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Resource Type:
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Asset Name:
E004940 - Cairns, Sir Hugh William Bell (1896 - 1952)
Title:
Cairns, Sir Hugh William Bell (1896 - 1952)
Author:
Royal College of Surgeons of England
Identifier:
RCS: E004940
Publisher:
London : Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date:
2014-02-03
Description:
Obituary for Cairns, Sir Hugh William Bell (1896 - 1952), Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Language:
English
Source:
Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Full Name:
Cairns, Sir Hugh William Bell
Date of Birth:
26 June 1896
Place of Birth:
South Australia, Australia
Date of Death:
18 July 1952
Place of Death:
Oxford
Occupation:
Titles/Qualifications:
KBE 1946

MRCS and FRCS 8 December 1921

MB BS Adelaide 1917

MA Oxford 1937

DM 1938

MD ad eundem Adelaide 1948

Hon FRACS 1948

Hon DSc Northwestern University Chicago 1950
Details:
He was born in South Australia 26 June 1896 son of William Cairns, a carpenter and builder of Port Pirie near Adelaide, and Amy Florence Bell his wife; both parents survived their son. William Cairns was a collateral relative of the Ulster family, whose most famous member Hugh, 1st Earl Cairns (1819-85), was twice Lord Chancellor of England; but he himself was a man of humble means who emigrated from Glasgow to Australia in search of health; his wife was of Australian descent in the third generation; she died near Oxford on 18 October 1964 aged 97. Hugh Cairns was educated at the High School and the University, Adelaide, qualifying in 1917. He had already served in the ranks of the Australian Army since the outbreak of war in 1914, and now was commissioned in the Australian Army Medical Corps and went on active service to the Middle East and France. In January 1919 he entered Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and rowed against Cambridge in the boat-race of 1920. He took the Fellowship at the end of 1921 and held resident appointments at the Radcliffe Infirmary under E C Bevers, and the London Hospital, where he was house officer to Henry Souttar and George Riddoch. He was a Hunterian Professor at the College in 1926, lecturing on neoplasms of the testicle. At this time he was chiefly interested in genito-urinary surgery, but during a long visit to America with a Rockefeller Fellowship he came under the influence of Harvey Cushing and turned to neuro-surgery. At about the same time Geoffrey Jefferson at Manchester and Norman Dott at Edinburgh were specialising in the same field. Cairns was elected an assistant surgeon to the London Hospital in 1926, became neuro-surgeon in 1933, and was afterwards a consulting surgeon. Cairns was interested in the advancement of knowledge, and in developing the new method of practice based on the team or unit at the hospital. He made all his patients, and they were very numerous, consult him at the London Hospital in the East-end, and kept no West-end consulting room. His mastery of surgery was matched by the personal gifts of the complete physician. Cairns's heart was at Oxford, and it was his vision and advice, in cordial co-operation with that of the Regius Professor Sir F Buzzard, which are believed to have determined the form taken by Lord Nuffield's benefactions to the Oxford medical school. Some have doubted whether Oxford is a city large enough to provide material for a number of professors at the highest clinical level, but in Cairns's case there could be no question of the mutual fitness of the task and the man. At the age of 41 he gave up the prospect of a great metropolitan career, and set about creating a school of neuro-surgery at Oxford. He was appointed the first Nuffield Professor of Surgery with a unit at the Radcliffe Infirmary in 1937, and was elected a Fellow of Balliol; he proceeded to the DM degree in 1938. He already had an international reputation as a brain surgeon, and could have won the widest fame and a large fortune by devoting himself entirely to practice; or he might have enjoyed the comparative leisure of pure scientific research for which he was thoroughly equipped. He preferred however a third, more arduous and less profitable, choice: a combination of research and teaching. This brought its own reward in the creation of a school in which, by strenuous activity, he won the devotion of several generations of students in the few years that fate allowed to him. He picked his students and drove them almost as hard as he drove himself. Within two years of his starting work at Oxford war again broke out, and Cairns threw himself with characteristic energy into new spheres. His work during the war was notable not only for its surgical achievement, but for the vision with which he advocated and used the newest advances of medicine and organisation. He devised a crash-helmet and a leg-shield for motor cyclists, which saved innumerable lives and prevented countless fractures among dispatch riders. He also planned the mobile operating theatres for neuro-surgery, which proved of the greatest value in the fast-moving battles of the North African deserts. From Cushing he had learnt that the surgeon himself ought to master the various specialties which in practice are provided by the different members of his team. He also learnt from Cushing to record every case with as much precision and detail as if it were to be written up and published. The German neuro-surgeon and physiologist Otfrid Foerster, who similarly combined clinical and research work, also influenced him deeply. He collaborated closely with his physician colleagues, when surgeon to the Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy, Maida Vale, 1931-34, and to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, 1934-37, where he was associated with Sir Charles Symonds FRCP; this association was renewed during the war years, when St Hugh's College, Oxford was converted into a neuro-surgical hospital. He collaborated with Dorothy Russell in studying the neuropathology of gliomas and of subdural haematoma, and after the introduction of penicillin he took a major part in its rapid adoption, collaborating with Honor Smith in a study of the application of antibiotics to pyogenic and tuberculous meningitis; this fundamental research was undertaken during busy clinical and administrative war-work. He collaborated with M H Jupe FRCS in a study of neuro-radiology; he himself studied akinetic mutism, the experimental physiology of leucotomy, and neuro-ophthalmology; in this last field he made considerable personal observations, charting his patients' visual fields. At the end of his life he was working on the problem of consciousness. Russell Brain his one-time colleague at the London pointed out that "while he made no great discoveries in the field of disordered function under conditions accessible only to the neuro-surgeon, his keen observations were an education to his colleagues as well as to his pupils". Cairns's experience during the war was summarised in the chapters which he contributed to the *War Supplement* No 1, *Wounds of the head*, which he compiled and edited for the *British Journal of Surgery*. His statesmanlike outlook and his war experience led him to advocate a combined medical service for the Navy, Army, and Air Force. He served with the rank of Brigadier AMS, and was created KBE in 1946. This wide outlook, combined with his Australian birth, won him appointment as the first Sims Travelling Professor, when Sir Arthur Sims endowed his great foundation in 1948; Cairns visited Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. He not only lectured and visited hospitals, he entered with his characteristic friendliness into the medical life of the communities he visited, and he gave much thought to the future development of inter-commonwealth medical education. In his report he suggested that the time was ripe for "Rhodes scholarships in reverse"; this prophecy was fulfilled when the State of Victoria's "British Memorial Fund", for scholarships for British scientists and scholars to visit Australia, was announced on the day of his death. He visited America again in 1950 and quickly familiarised himself with the latest developments of neuro-surgery there. In particular he became interested in the use of surgical intervention for alleviation of mental disease. He advocated and developed the operation of hemispherectomy, devised by his pupil Rowland Krynauw of Johannesburg, which gave promise of being more selective and less damaging than others then in use. Cairns seemed to be endowed with perpetual youth; strongly built, vigorous, handsome, he radiated encouragement and energy. But he was struck down by malignant disease and died a few weeks after his fifty-sixth birthday, on 18 July 1952, at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. Cairns married in 1921 Barbara Foster, youngest daughter of Arthur Lionel Smith, Master of Balliol. They lived at 24 St John's Wood Park, London, and later at 29 Charlbury Road, Oxford, with a country home at The Old Rectory, South Stoke, near Arundel, Sussex. The marriage was singularly happy, and brought Cairns into a large and distinguished family circle. Lady Cairns survived him with two sons and two daughters; his parents also outlived him. The funeral service was at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 22 July, and a memorial service was held in the same church on the 25th. At St Philip's Church, London Hospital, Whitechapel, a memorial service was held on 30 July, when Sir Russell Brain PRCP delivered the funeral oration. Towards the end of his life Cairns filled many arduous offices and delivered a number of important lectures. He served on the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, 1942-50. The West London Medico-chirurgical Society awarded him its triennial medal in 1935. He gave the Lister lecture of Adelaide during his Australian visit of 1948, when he was elected MD ad eundem, and the Horsley lecture at University College, London, in 1949. He was President of the Section of Neurology at the Royal Society of Medicine in 1944, of the Society of British Neurological Surgeons in 1946-48, the Association of Surgeons in 1947, and the Section of Neurology at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association at Liverpool in 1950. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons at Melbourne in 1948, an Honorary Doctor of Science of Northwestern University, Chicago in 1950, and a Corresponding Member of the Académie de Chirurgie at Paris. He visited Louvain in November 1951, while his friend Professor John Fulton of Yale was there as temporary professor of physiology; Fulton noticed that the Belgian students flocked about him "enthralled by his magnetism and fire". In April 1952 he was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Portugal. His interest in rowing and cricket, in music and books, and his fund of anecdote made him a delightful companion. His success in affairs was partly due to his enthusiasm, always expressed in clear and logical argument. At the suggestion and with the support of Lord Nuffield the University of Oxford in 1957 established a fund for neurological research in Cairns's memory. Principal Publications: Neoplasms of the testicle. Hunterian lectures, RCS. *Lancet* 1926, 1, 845. Study of intracranial surgery. *Spec Rept ser, Med Res Counc*, 125, 1928. Observations on localisation of intracranial tumours; disclosure of localising signs following decompression or ventriculography. *Lancet* 1929, 1, 600-603; *Arch Surg* 1929, 18, 1936-44. Ocular manisfestations of head njuries, with C Goulden and others. *Trans Ophthal Soc UK* 1929, 49, 314-352. Observations on treatment of ependymal gliomas of spinal cord, with G Riddoch. *Brain* 1931, 54, 117-146. Intracranial and spinal metastases in gliomas of brain, with D S Russell. *Brain* 1931, 54, 377-420. Subdural false membrane or haematoma (pachymeningitis interna haemorrhagica) in carcinomatosis and sarcomata of dura mater, with D S Russell. *Brain* 1934, 57, 32-48. Accessory methods of diagnosis in intracranial tumours and allied diseases. *Trans Med Soc Lond* 1935, 58, 50-74. Ultimate results of operations for intracranial tumours; study of series of cases after nine year interval. *Yale J Biol Med* 1936, 8, 421-492. Injuries of frontal and ethmoidal sinuses with special reference to cerebrospinal rhinorrhoea and aeroceles. *J Laryng* 1937, 52, 589-623. Observations on pathology of Ménières syndrome, with C S Hallpike. *Proc Roy Soc Med* 1938, 31, 1317-1336, and *J Laryng* 1938, 53, 625-654. [The first demonstration that dilatation of the membranous labyrinth is a proximate cause of the disease.] Peripheral ocular palsies from the neurosurgical point of view. *Trans Ophthal Soc UK* 1938, 58, 464-482. Investigation of war wounds: penicillin; a preliminary report, with H W Florey, K C Eden, and J Shoreston. *War Office publication*, AMD 7-90 D, 1943. Head injuries in motor cyclists, with special reference to crash helmets. *Brit med J* 1943, 1, 591. Penicillin in head and spinal wounds. *Brit J Surg* 1944, 32, 199. Wounds of the head. *Brit J Surg, War supplement*, 1, 1947, edited by Cairns and including his papers: Neurosurgery in the British Army 1939-45, pp 9-26. Localized hydrocephalus following penetrating wounds of the ventricle, with Peter Daniel, R T Johnson, and G B Northcroft, p 187. Delayed complications after head wounds, with especial reference to intracranial infection, with C A Calvert, Peter Daniel, and G B Northcroft, p 198. Disturbances of consciousness with lesions of the brain-stem and diencephalon. Victor Horsley memorial lecture, University College Hospital, 8 December 1949. *Brain*. 1952, 75, 109-145, published posthumously.
Sources:
*The Times* 4 May 1948, leading article on his Sims professorship

19 July 1952 p 6 D, with further eulogies on 23rd, 25th, 26th, 30th and 4 August

*Brit med J* 1952, 2, pages 233, 287, 342 and 618

*Lancet* 1952, 2, 202

*Lond Hosp Gaz* 1952, 55, 105: Sir Russell Brain's memorial oration

*Brit J Surg* 1952, 40, 173 and 1968, 55, 1-4 by Joseph Pennybacker with portraits

Sir Geoffrey Jefferson "Memories of Hugh Cairns" *J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiat* 1959, 22, 155-166
Rights:
Copyright (c) The Royal College of Surgeons of England
Collection:
Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format:
Obituary
Format:
Asset
Asset Path:
Root/Lives of the Fellows/E004000-E004999/E004900-E004999
Media Type:
Unknown