In a case destined for the annals of surgical oddities, Andrew Wright, MD, director of the UW Medicine Hernia Center at Northwest Hospital, in Seattle, received a call one Saturday morning in June from a colleague, asking him to see a 430-pound male gorilla with an umbilical hernia.
To be clear, this was no metaphorical gorilla in the room. It was a real-life, 38-year-old gorilla named Vip—short for Very Important Primate—at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Vip earned his name by