[4][5] Shortly thereafter, he was offered[4] a one-year Surgical Internship at Lakewood Hospital, near Cleveland, Ohio, by Director of Surgery Carl Hahn.

[b] From 1954 to 1959, Steichen was Surgical Resident at Baltimore City Hospital ("BCH," now Bayview Medical Center), led by Director of Surgery Mark M.

[8] [c] At BCH, Steichen and Ravitch also developed a trusting, collegial relationship that extended beyond the hospital ward and lasted for 35 years.

[11][12][13][14] The staplers they used had been procured by Mark Ravitch in Moscow during a medical experts' visit to the Soviet Union earlier in 1958[15][16][17][18] that was unrelated to stapling.

[15][16][19][20] In 139 pulmonary lobectomies and segmentectomies for tuberculosis through 1961, the BCH team showed a significant reduction in life-threatening complication of bronchial fistula,[d] from 14% using manual closures to 4.6% using staplers.

[22] This work was published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Steichen's first appearance as a major author of a scientific paper.

Yet large-scale applicability of mechanical suturing did not come about until Ravitch and Steichen began developing techniques for modern instruments and popularizing them in the surgical community through their writings, films and teaching seminars.

The result was an informal group, comprising Ravitch, Steichen, Hirsch and eventual Executive Vice President of U.S. Surgical Turi Josefsen.

[47][m][49][n][o][p][q][r][55] The team also: The six years from 1963 to 1969 mark the transformation of surgical stapling from a curiosity, practiced in almost no hospitals outside of the Soviet Union, to the technological vanguard in wound closure.

Steichen finished his period at Albert Einstein with a Sabbatical year in Switzerland, as visiting professor at the University of Geneva Medical School and in the Division of Cardiovascular Surgery of the Hôpital Cantonal de Genève from 1969 to 1970.

[56] During that year, Steichen introduced the new American staplers into clinical practice in Europe, performing a number of successful surgical interventions at the Hôpital Cantonal.

[57][58] He focused particularly on the esophagus,[59] as well as gastric (stomach) reconstructions, intestinal pouches, and operations in the lowest parts of the pelvis.

These films were used as teaching tools at the Montefiore Hospital auditorium during the Pitt workshops, by medical schools, and by U.S. Surgical's Education Department to train sales representatives for the company.

He invited students and surgeons from Europe and North Africa to come to Pittsburgh or NYMC to learn about surgical stapling.

In 1994, Steichen and Roger Welter co-edited a compendium of state of the art in these new techniques: Minimally-Invasive Surgery and New Technology, containing contributions from over 100 authors.

[84] A selection follows: In Pittsburgh, Steichen produced or co-produced 17 films,[84][85][86] 10 of which were later converted into video by the Ciné-Med Corporation, and are now in the library of the American College of Surgeons.

[87] Some of these were combined and given new names when re-issued between 1989 and 1991: Steichen married Michèle Queinnec on July 2, 1961, in Brignogan-Plages, Finistère, France.