Leonard Malis, who died Monday at 86, was an innovator in microscopic surgery on the brain who led the neurosurgery department at Mount Sinai Hospital for two decades.

He was famed for his operating room inventions, many of them developed in prototype in the basement workshop of his Hollis Hills, N.Y., home. One was the bipolar coagulator, a tool that made spinal and brain microsurgery possible by stanching bleeding. He also introduced to the neurosurgical operating theater binocular microscopes and headlamps powered by fiber optics.

Malis’s introduction of the television camera to neurosurgery allowed not only relatives and medical students to follow the progress of an operation, but at one point provided the live feed for a “Today” show broadcast of brain surgery.

Malis, who grew up in Philadelphia, was granted his M.D. from the University of Virginia. His medical training was interrupted by World War II, during which he served as a captain and, despite having no specialized training in the area, took over the neurological unit of his hospital. After the war, Malis trained in neurology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and, after a fellowship at Yale, joined the Mount Sinai faculty in 1951.

He developed the bipolar coagulator in the mid-1950s, and later produced innovations in tools that photographed organs.

A reporter who watched him at work in 1981 found that Malis’s operating tools included a number of home-made elements, including a servo motor from a Lincoln Continental’s power window that controlled the height of his stool and ordinary platinum razor blades cut into surgical blades. Malis held at least a half-dozen patents.

Within his discipline, Malis was known for conducting painstaking, 22-hour operations, often on patients who had been operated on by others without success.

“It’s no fun climbing a small mountain,” Malis once told the Associated Press.

He was also known for his aggressive stance toward fighting neurosurgical infections using a cocktail of antibiotics. This caused controversy among some doctors who felt it would lead toward resistant strains of infection.

Malis sat on the board of the Valley Forge Scientific Corporation, a public company founded by his brother, Jerry, which sells neurosurgical equipment, some of it based on Malis’s inventions.

Leonard Irving Malis
Born November 23, 1919, in Philadelphia; died August 12; survived by his son, Larry, daughter, Lynn Schiff-Malis, three grandchildren, and his brother, Jerry.