Arpad Gerster (1848-1923) was a Hungarian surgeon, scholar, artist, humanist and sportsman of great energy and intellectual capacity.  He emigrated to the United States in the 1870s and met his wife Anna (from Cincinnati, OH) during one his ocean voyages.  They married 1875 and had one son John.  A man of extraordinary interests and powers of observation, he was a linguist, musician, artist, traveler and writer, in addition to conducting an exemplary career in medicine. His diaries chronicling his visits to the Adirondacks New York State (Raquette and Long lakes, where the Gersters had camps) from 1895 into the early 1900's are a unique and exceptionally vivid and astute record of the region in that time period.  Gerster was about to settle in Kassa when he was called to the colors as an army surgeon. When he was finally placed on the reserve list he was appointed pathologist at the Kassa City Hospital. Since he had an uncle in Brooklyn, New York, and had read much about America, he conceived the idea of settling in the United States, which notion was regarded by all his friends and associates as incomparably foolish.  For the first few years, he was engaged in general practice in Brooklyn, NY.  The new antiseptic technique which was gradually being adopted tended to make specialization practicable if not almost necessary, however, and after removing from Brooklyn to New York Gerster practised surgery exclusively.  He received in 1878 the appointment of attending surgeon to the German (later Lenox Hill) Hospital and two years later, a like appointment to the Mount Sinai Hospital, being one of the few Gentiles to be thus honored.  In 1882, with John A. Wyeth, he was made surgeon to and professor of surgery in the new New York Polyclinic, retaining this chair until 1894.  Having espoused the new technique inaugurated by Lord Lister, he became distinguished as a teacher; among his pupils were William J. and Charles Mayo.  In 1902, he refused a tentative offer of the chair of surgery in the University of Budapest.  He served as president of the American Surgical Association in 1911-12, and in 1916, he was appointed professor of clinical surgery at Columbia University.  His medical writings, with the exception of his text-book, were limited to clinical and historical papers. In 1917, he published his much-read autobiography, Recollections of a New York Surgeon. Achievements Gerster was the first in America to publish a text-book on the new surgery, Rules of Aseptic and Antiseptic Surgery (1888).  Not only was it revolutionary in content, but the mechanical work was ultramodern; it contained some of the earliest of half-tone pictures, made from the author’s own plates.  This epoch-making book went through three editions in two years, and was then allowed to lapse because the author believed that it had done its work.