Richard F. Edlich

His basic clinical and research interests are focused on improving the safety and outcome of wound care in emergency medicine and surgery.

After Edlich learned about endoscopes in Asia, he received an endoscope for gastroscopic visualization of the patient's stomach. As a surgical resident, Edlich was the first physician to do gastroscopy at the University of Minnesota Medical Center. Edlich's picture was featured on the cover of Postgraduate Medicine, the Journal of Applied Medicine, in November, 1968. His experiences with gastroscopy led to the first minimally invasive surgical procedure at the University of Minnesota Hospital, an endoscopic gastrostomy.

Edlich soon realized the limitations of the thick, narrow-diameter latex Ewald tubes that were being used to evacuate blood clots from the patient's stomach before endoscopic examination. Edlich devised a thin-walled, transparent, plastic tube for evacuation of blood clots from a patient's stomach.