0 an informal way of referring to a doctor, especially a surgeon (= a doctor specially trained to perform medical operations):
The gloomiest prognosis comes from a sawbones at Leeds General Infirmary, who suspects that the star player has a stress fracture.
If an orthopaedic surgeon is a sawbones and a clinical psychiatrist is a shrink, what nicknames might be appropriate to other trades and professions?
The team have an injury list to scare the most hard-working sawbones.
The type of amputation performed in the Civil War era by a surgeon called a sawbones was straight across the leg, with all bone and soft tissue severed at the same level.
A silly, selfish hypochondriac demands that his daughter marry a doctor she doesn't love just so he can have a sawbones nearby.
