G. Patrick Maxwell

Who is G. Patrick Maxwell?

G. Patrick Maxwell is a plastic surgeon and an assistant clinical professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University, based in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

Maxwell is a graduate of the Vanderbilt University Medical School, and trained in general and then plastic surgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland. He also completed a fellowship in microsurgery at the University of California, San Francisco, with the microsurgical pioneer, Harry J. Buncke, and in hand surgery at the Curtis Hand Center in Baltimore.

Maxwell was the surgeon and co-author of the first successful report of microsurgical transfer of the latissimus muscle flap, at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, he relocated to Nashville, where he founded the Nashville Plastic Surgery Institute and established a fellowship training program in breast and cosmetic surgery.

Maxwell is credited with a significant advancement in the design of tissue expanders used for breast reconstruction by co-developing textured surfaces and helping to introduce prostheses which more closely resemble the shape and feel of the natural breast. The two-stage method of expander-implant reconstruction as described by Maxwell and Spears has become the most widely used technique for implant-based breast reconstruction.