Lawson Tait, father of aseptic surgery and gynecology
Robert Lawson Tait. via Wikimedia. Robert Lawson Tait was fifth in a dynasty of pioneers who helped transform surgery from a primitive craft to a sophisticated life-saving art. They all worked for a time at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary—James Syme (the “Napoleon of Surgery”), Robert Liston (“time me, gentlemen”), James Simpson (“made childbirth painless”), and […]
William Sands Cox—surgeon and founder of the Birmingham Medical School
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom Drawing of William Sands Cox by T H Mcguire. 1854. Public domain. Via Wikimedia In the early nineteenth century Birmingham was the second largest city in England. It was an industrial powerhouse, known as the city of a thousand trades, but it did not have its own medical […]
Alfred Skirrow Robinson: the colorful life of a Roaring Twenties surgeon
Stephen Martin Durham, UK & Thailand Fig 1. Bentley Speed Six. Source: Craig Howell, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia In 1926 my grandfather started work for Dr. A.S. Robinson in Redcar, a small town on the Yorkshire coast. The doctor needed a driver—at least that was the plan at first. He sent him for a […]
William Marsden, surgeon and founder of the Royal Free and Royal Marsden Hospitals, London
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom Portrait of William Marsden by Thomas Illidge 1850. Picture in public domain. Source To found one hospital is a fairly unusual achievement; to found two is a rare feat indeed. William Marsden, a nineteenth-century British doctor, founded both the Royal Free Hospital and the Royal Cancer Hospital (now known […]
Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie: William James Mayo, (1861-1938) and Charles Horace Mayo (1865-1939)
John Raffensperger Fort Meyers, Florida, United States Portrait of William Worrell Mayo and his sons: Charles Mayo (right) and William James Mayo (left). Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) The father of the Mayo brothers, William Worall Mayo, was born in a village near Manchester, England, in 1819. His father died when […]
Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes
JMS Pearce East Yorks, UK Fig 1. Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes. Reproduction after a pencil drawing by G. Shaw, 1957. Credit: Wellcome Collection. (CC BY 4.0) Mention the name Keynes in Britain and most people think of the Buckinghamshire town Milton Keynes or the celebrated twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes. In the thirteenth century […]
Abraham Colles—giant among surgeons
Abraham Colles. Source. Abraham Colles was born in Kilkenny in Ireland in 1773. The story has it that as a boy he found an anatomy book in a field after a flood had destroyed a doctor’s house. He took the book to his owner, a Dr. Butler, who, finding he was so interested in it, […]
Thomas Keith; pioneer photographer and pioneer surgeon
Iain Macintyre Edinburgh, Scotland Figure 1. Thomas Keith. Artist and date unknown. Etching with Keith’s signature (image reproduced with permission Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh). “His success so far outstripped that of all other operators, that it became a wonder and admiration of surgeons all over the world.”1 So wrote J Marion Sims […]
Theodor Kocher (1841-1917)
Emil Theodor Kocher. published in 1909 in Les Prix Nobel p. 66. Via Wikimedia. Theodor Kocher was the first surgeon to ever receive the Nobel Prize. He was born in 1841 in Bern, Switzerland, went to school there, and was first in his class. He studied medicine in Bern and graduated summa cum laude, then went […]
Conjoined twins: art, ethics, and the media
John Raffensperger Fort Meyers, Florida, United States Conjoined twins have fascinated humans since earliest times. Artists illustrated twins in clay, stone statues, wood carvings, and portraits. They were exhibited on stage, in freak shows, and the circus. The worldwide news media, especially the intrusive television camera, has now replaced the circus as a means […]