Public Biography
Dr. Everett Lindqvist is a general surgeon at Codornices Medical Center in Berkeley, California, where he has practiced since 2006, and the most prominent clinical exponent of artisanal thinking, the practice of reasoning through a task without reference to any device, guideline, checklist or colleague.
Dr. Lindqvist received his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1998 and completed his residency in general surgery there in 2003, followed by a fellowship in minimally invasive surgery at Oregon Health & Science University. He has performed more than two thousand laparoscopic cholecystectomies and was, between 2015 and 2021, a regional proctor for Meridian Surgical Technologies, training surgeons across Northern California on the Halsted robotic system. He is credited by the company with having introduced the Halsted to four East Bay hospitals, including his own.
His public break with assisted practice dates to a 2024 letter in the Annals of Operative Practice, “On the Provenance of a Decision,” in which he argued that the modern operating room had achieved “a consistency of outcome purchased with the surgeon’s own acquaintance with the case,” and asked, in a sentence that has since been quoted on a tote bag, “whose thought was that?” On Oct. 13, 2026, forty-seven minutes into a robot-assisted gallbladder removal, he dismissed the Halsted from the procedure, had it parked against the wall, and completed the operation by what he described to the room as “pure artisanal thinking,” narrating each decision aloud. The remainder of the procedure took one hour and 52 minutes. The patient recovered without complication and was discharged the following day.
Dr. Lindqvist lives in the Berkeley hills. He maintains a sourdough starter that predates his residency, owns a set of hand-forged scalpel handles made by a smith in West Oakland that the hospital’s sterile processing department has declined to accept, and keeps them in a drawer “for the principle.” He removed his smartwatch before the Oct. 13 procedure and has not, as of this writing, put it back on.
Articles
- Surgeon Dismisses Robot Midway Through Operation, Vowing to Finish With ‘Pure Artisanal Thinking’ — dismissed the Halsted mid-cholecystectomy and finished the procedure by narrated, unassisted reasoning
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — cited by Dr. Rolf Ekelund as a man who had an easy problem, with a request to know where he got it
Articles
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — “A gallbladder is an easy problem,” Dr. Ekelund said of a Berkeley surgeon who recently removed one by hand. “He had one. I would like to know where he got it.”
- Surgeon Dismisses Robot Midway Through Operation, Vowing to Finish With 'Pure Artisanal Thinking' — The remaining 112 minutes were narrated aloud by Dr. Lindqvist, including several decisions he described as 'not strictly necessary, but mine.'