Fortunately, discoveries by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and William Macewen during the 1850–1870s ushered in advancements in sterility and antisepsis that Theodor Billroth, and later his pupil Emil Theodor Kocher, leveraged (in addition to meticulous surgical technique and improved anesthesia) to revolutionize endocrine surgery and drastically reduce complications. In 1917 Kocher summarized his career work, citing a mortality rate of 0.5% (much reduced from prior rates as high as 40–50%) [1, 8]. In recognition of his contributions, in 1909 Kocher was the rst surgeon to be awarded a Nobel Prize [8]. Kocher and Billroth, while pioneers in the eld, were not immune to the innate complications inherent to the complexities of the thyroid gland. Billroth was considered a rapid surgeon, less concerned about delicate technique, and his patients therefore suffered a high rate of parathyroid injury and subsequent hypocalcemia and tetany. In contrast, Kocher was a more meticulous, deliberate surgeon, so his patients had low rates of tetany but many instead suffered from myxedema (a term coined by William Ord in 1877), the his­torical name for severe hypothyroidism [1, 9, 10]. Halsted was able to observe both iconic surgeons at work and postulated these differences to “lie in the operative methods … Kocher neat and precise, operating in a bloodless manner…doing little damage outside the capsule…Billroth, operating more rapidly…with less concern for hemorrhage might easily have removed the parathyroids … and left remnants of the thyroid” [7]. Nevertheless, the debilitating myxedema in Kocher’s patients prompted his later advocacy for lobectomies opposed to total thyroidectomies [11]. Medical prevention of myxedema was introduced by George Murray in 1891in the form of subcutaneous injections of sheep thyroid extract, followed shortly thereafter by an oral derivative by Edward Fox laying the foundation for our modern pharma­cologic thyroid hormone analogues used today [3].