Andrea Bevans, chief operating officer of Holy Name Hospital, knew it was a matter of when, not if. The memo she had just read was the first salvo in what promised to be another turf battle within the medical staff organization. In the memo, the hospital's vascular surgeons demanded that radiologists not be allowed to perform balloon angioplasty. Bevans knew that this treatment used a balloon at the end of a catheter and that after the catheter had been threaded into an artery in the peripheral vascular system, the balloon was inflated to break up deposits that narrowed the arteries. The memo stated that vascular surgeons had the background, training, expertise, and proven outcomes using surgical skills and that they could best learn and apply the new techniques, if those techniques were appropriate at all. To allow radiologists to work inside the peripheral vascular system would violate previously tried and tested relationships and would cause other, unspecified, disruptions. The memo ended with a chilling, thinly veiled threat: "Should the hospital allow radiologists to perform balloon angioplasty, it may not be possible for members of the surgical staff to be available to treat untoward events, should they occur as the result of a procedure done by radiologists." Bevans reread the memo and mused about the path of modern medicine. It was reaching the point where many conditions were treated without a scalpel. She thought fleetingly about "Bones," the Star Trek physician, wh