Now! Then! Writing to Berkeley Moynihan, Clifford Allbutt recalls surgery at Leeds Infirmary in the 1860s

8 January 1925: Writing to Berkeley Moynihan, Clifford Allbutt recalls surgery at Leeds Infirmary in the 1860s

Humphry Davy Rolleston. 1929. The Right Honourable Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt. London: Macmillan. Get it:

Excerpt

In those days the staff operated as a whole, all putting their dirty fingers into interesting wounds, and exhaling vapours from their unwashed woollen dressing-gowns! They frankly criticized each other during operation. … My association with Teale began with ophthalmic and pleuritic surgery; as a pupil of Trousseau I returned to Leeds with views about thoracic surgery; and, as Trousseau did his own thoracic surgery, I was doing likewise; but the physicians forbade it, to my only backer’s (Teale) indignation. … You will hardly believe that then pleuritic effusions – even empyemas – were left to nature. … It was the imperative rule that every acute abdomen should be taken first to a medical ward! I stopped all that. Then Teale and I took up scrofula. You have no idea of the curse scrofula was; girls going about like swine, both sides of the neck levelled up to the jaws; one of our first, cases – an otherwise beautiful girl of one of the great Yorkshire houses – was not cleared until “after 14 operations.”

Order the book

Subscribe to the free daily email

To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

Something to say? Get in touch

Original

I cannot refrain from teasing you with a letter of congratulation on your history of Leeds Surgery. It will be a classic, or at least a locus classicus for the future history of surgery. I must do more than thank you for your too kind words concerning myself. Such words from a friend, if too generous, are none the less very agreeable to read. I was glad to see full justice at last done to my old friend Mr. Jessop. He was Resident Medical Officer at the Old Infirmary when I was elected on the staff, and helped me in scores of ways, as I was a novice off whom he might have scored had he chosen to shew off! He made so great a reputation there (at the hospital) that on commencing practice he was almost mobbed. … In those days the Staff operated as a whole, all putting their dirty fingers into interesting wounds, and exhaling vapours from their unwashed woollen dressing-gowns! They frankly criticized each other during operation. … My association with Teale began with ophthalmic and pleuritic surgery; as a pupil of Trousseau I returned to Leeds with views about thoracic surgery; and, as Trousseau did his own thoracic surgery, I was doing likewise; but the physicians forbade it, to my only backer’s (Teale) indignation. … You will hardly believe that then pleuritic effusions – even empyemas – were left to nature. … It was the imperative rule that every acute abdomen should be taken first to a medical ward! I stopped all that, and then as to effusions William Roberts of Manchester followed very ably. Then Teale and I took up scrofula. You have no idea of the curse scrofula was; girls going about like swine, both sides of the neck levelled up to the jaws; one of our first, cases – an otherwise beautiful girl of one of the great Yorkshire houses – was not cleared until “after 14 operations”.

324 words.