Search Results for Medical Obituaries - Narrowed by: Hepato-pancreato-biliary surgeon

First Title value, for Searching Knight, Michael James (1939 - 2011)

2024-05-06T05:59:51Z

by Donal Shanahan
Publication Date 2011-11-03 2012-02-01
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E001000-E001999/E001400-E001499
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/373671373671
Occupation Biliary surgeon Hepato-pancreato-biliary surgeon
Details Michael James Knight was a biliary surgeon at St James' Hospital, Balham, and St George's Hospital. He was born on 29 August 1939 in Canning Town, London, the son of Charles Knight, a builder, and Ellen Elizabeth Knight née Murphy, a cook. He and his brother Richard were the first of the family to go to university, Mike studying medicine at St George's Hospital Medical School, his brother obtaining a PhD in chemistry. On telling their father that they were both doctors, he questioned when they were going to stop 'playing at university' and get a proper job. During the war years, Knight was evacuated to Somerset, forming a life-long bond with the county and subsequently purchasing a family holiday home there. He qualified in 1963 and, after his houseman year, worked at the Royal Hampshire Hospital, Winchester, before returning to St George's Hospital as a surgical registrar. It was during this period that he worked for Lord Rodney Smith, who became his mentor and guide during the rest of his professional life. Some of Mike's more colourful behaviour can be attributed to the influence of Smith, including his legendary behaviour in the operating theatre and his affection for hospital managers. His research took him to America, where he was a fellow to Washington University, St Louis, and, after his return, was appointed as a senior surgical registrar at St George's Hospital. His research culminated in his Hunterian Professorship in 1975. In 1978 he was appointed as a consultant surgeon to St James' Hospital, Balham, and as an honorary senior lecturer in St George's Hospital Medical School. He established himself as a biliary surgeon and his skill, loyalty and discretion soon led to him heading up a world-renowned tertiary referral centre for bile duct strictures. In 1988 St James' Hospital was amalgamated with St George's. At this stage Mike set up and ran the ERCP (endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography) centre there. His skill with the endoscope further enhanced his reputation as a master biliary surgeon. Outside the hospital, he was a member of the Court of Examiners for the Royal College of Surgeons of England and a member of the board of trustees to the Pancreatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, of which he was made president in 1987. He was a very private man and those who knew this side of him were fully aware that he was a devoted family man. He married Phyllis ('Phyl'), a nurse, in 1981. The warmth and generosity of spirit shown by both Mike and Phyl to all those invited into their home were evident. Many evenings ended with Mike playing the piano, music being another of his passions. The last few years of his professional life were dogged with ill health, but before retiring in 2005 he managed to maintain the ERCP service in St George's Hospital, for which he had become famous and continue his ongoing campaign with hospital managers. He was survived by his wife Phyl and his children William and Ellie, who, to his immense pride, have followed him into medicine.
Resource Identifier RCS: E001488
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
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First Title value, for Searching Blumgart, Leslie Harold (1931 - 2022)

2024-05-06T05:59:51Z

by Graeme Poston
Publication Date 2022-11-16
JPEG Image
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E010000-E010999/E010100-E010199
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/386169386169
Occupation Hepato-pancreato-biliary surgeon General surgeon
Details Leslie H Blumgart (‘Les’) was one of the world leaders in hepato-pancreato-biliary (HPB) surgery. Known affectionately as ‘the professor’ by his many trainees, he was a dominant figure in the evolution of HPB surgery around the world for almost 50 years and built one of the great HPB clinical and academic programs at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York. He trained a generation of surgical oncologists and HPB surgeons who carry forward his legacy. He was born in Benoni, South Africa, on 7 December 1931, the son of Harold Hermann Blumgart, a mine surveyor, and Hilda Blumgart née Mitchell, a housewife. He attended Jeppe High School in Johannesburg and went on to study dentistry at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, qualifying in 1954. He then moved to the UK to study medicine at the University of Sheffield, from where he graduated in 1962. Having qualified in medicine he remained in Sheffield for his junior posts; he was a house surgeon to Andrew Watt Kay and a house physician to Charles Stuart-Harris. He then undertook a research fellowship on the management of liver trauma in the department of pathology, University of Nottingham, stimulating his career in hepatobiliary surgery. He gained his fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1966 and his MD in 1969. He went on to become an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the American College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. In 1970 he was appointed as a senior lecturer and deputy director in the department of surgery at the Welsh National School of Medicine, Cardiff and an honorary consultant surgeon at the University Hospital of Wales. From 1972 to 1979 he was the St Mungo professor of surgery at the University of Glasgow and an honorary consultant surgeon at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. He then moved to London, as professor of surgery and director of the department of surgery at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, University of London, and an honorary consultant at Hammersmith Hospital. In 1986 he was appointed as a professor of visceral and transplantation surgery at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and a consultant surgeon at Inselspital Bern. In 1991 he was recruited to New York, to the MSKCC as chief of the hepatobiliary (subsequently hepato-pancreaticobiliary) service in the department of surgery and holder of the Enid Haupt chair and professor of surgery at Cornell University Medical Center. Other positions held while at MSKCC included attending surgeon at the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases and director of the hepatobiliary disease management program. Les Blumgart was one of the most influential figures in the evolution of modern approaches to liver, pancreas and bile duct surgery. His life’s work took the field from performing surgical resections and reconstructions with frequent complications, massive blood loss and high mortality to a far safer and more effective era. He also led efforts to advance the multidisciplinary care of cancer patients, improving long-term outcomes through the integration of chemotherapy and radiation therapy with surgery. He authored over 500 papers in peer-reviewed journals, edited 15 books and wrote over 150 book chapters. He served on the editorial boards of 14 major journals in surgery, gastroenterology and oncology. Most significantly, he created the definitive text on surgery of the liver, biliary tract and pancreas, a work that is now in its seventh edition and continues to bear his name (*Blumgart’s surgery of the liver, biliary tract and pancreas* Elsevier, 2022). Over the years, he lectured nationally and internationally, delivering over 200 eponymous lectures and orations around the world. He was an honorary member or fellow of dozens of surgical associations, including the American Surgical Association, the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract, the Danish Surgical Society, the Hong Kong Surgical Society, the Hellenic Surgical Society and the Yugoslav Society of Surgery, and received the lifetime achievement award from the European Society of Surgical Oncology in 2014. Locally, he won the teacher of the year award in the department of surgery at MSKCC on multiple occasions (in 1999, 2005 and 2011) and received the MSKCC distinguished alumnus award in 2012. Blumgart was a founding member of the International Biliary Association, a precursor to the International Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Association (IHPBA), serving the organisation as an officer for many years, including as president in 1986. In more recent years, he was honoured by the IHPBA in 2008 as a ‘living legend’. Other honours and distinctions included the Moynihan travelling fellowship of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland in 1972 and the Order of the Prasidda, Prabala-Gorkha-Dakshin Bahu (Nepal), awarded in 1984. Despite his exceptional and perhaps unequalled contributions to HPB surgery, his greatest accomplishment (and the one he would most appreciate being recognised for) was in educating and training HPB surgeons from around the world. Many current leaders in HPB surgery and surgical oncology, as well as chairs of departments of surgery around the world, credit him with providing the training and inspiration that have guided their careers. While carrying out a vigorous practice at MSKCC for over two decades, he also generated a video library of complex HPB procedures, which he used in facilitating the training of HPB surgical fellows for many years. After he stopped performing clinical surgery himself, he continued to lecture regularly to the surgical fellows at MSKCC, facilitated by his films. Only in his last several years did health issues and the covid pandemic limit his teaching activities. Less well known was his great artistic talent, which he pursued well after he retired from clinical practice. He was a particularly gifted sculptor and watercolour painter, producing many magnificent pieces that graced his home. He married Pearl Navias in 1955, who passed away in 1967, before subsequently marrying Sarah Raybould Bowen in 1968. He died on 27 September 2022 at the age of 90. Sarah survived him, along with their four children, Michael, Karen, Oliver and Kate, and their grandchildren.
Resource Identifier RCS: E010178
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
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First Title value, for Searching Moossa, Abdool Rahim (1939 - 2013)

2024-05-06T05:59:51Z

by John P Neoptolemos
Publication Date 2014-10-17 2015-03-13
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E006000-E006999/E006100-E006199
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/378310378310
Occupation General surgeon Hepato-pancreato-biliary surgeon
Details Abdool Rahim Moossa, known as 'Babs', was chairman of the department of surgery at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He called his approach the 'triple threat', combining first rate surgery with advanced education, training and research, not surprisingly taking USCD onto the international stage as a world class surgery centre. Born in 1939 in Port Louis, Mauritius, his father, Yacoob, was a businessman and his mother, Maude, had her hands full raising Babs and his two brothers and four sisters. Mauritius, west of Madagascar in the south Indian Ocean, was originally discovered by Arabs before being visited by the Portuguese in 1507, then being successively colonised by the Dutch, French and then the British from 1810 until independence in 1968. At the age of six Babs was fortunate to be sent to study at the College du Saint Esprit, Paris. He stayed until 1953, when he returned to Mauritius to complete his education at the Royal College, Curepipe. This helps to explain his strong but charming French accent, his Arabic name and yet his fervent Britishness. He studied medicine in Liverpool, qualifying in 1965. He stayed in the city for his postgraduate training, becoming a senior surgical registrar in 1970. He became immersed in British values, which no doubt helped to progress his career across the Atlantic and he prided himself on remaining a British citizen, rather than becoming an American national. In 1972 he obtained a clinical fellowship in surgical oncology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore with David Bernt Skinner, who had joined the faculty in 1968 and had a meteoric career. In 1972 Skinner became the Dallas B Phemister professor and chairman of the department of surgery at the University of Chicago at the age of only 37. A year later, Babs Moossa made the wise decision to follow his mentor. David Skinner had been tasked with restoring the academic and clinical stature of the university's surgery programme. There is no doubt this was very valuable experience for the young Moossa for his future tasks at UCSD. Babs progressed from consultant surgeon and assistant professor to full professor and chief of general surgical services from 1977 and director of surgical research in 1978 before his move to UCSD in 1983. Babs is distinguished as putting pancreas surgery as a specialty on the map and he was meticulously clinically focused. He was one of the very first to look at early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. His first major competitive grant in 1974 was from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to 'develop methods for the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer'. A further NIH grant in 1978 was to 'improve methods of imaging the pancreas'. One of my fondest memories of Babs was seeing him debating in full flight at surgical congresses, not least with his colleague and superior George Block. Babs was clearly the new kid on the block, whereas George was, well, the old kid on the block. Their differences were accentuated by the charming Franco-English of Babs and the gruffness of George (extreme, even for a Chicagoan), who one felt at times was still fighting in Korea. George could never quite see that log-rank analysis of Kaplan-Meier survival curves was far more 'real' and accurate than 'actual' crude survival estimates. Babs always worked extremely hard and, despite becoming the associate dean and special counsel to the vice chancellor for health sciences and director of tertiary and quaternary services from 2003, he was renowned for always being available for his patients and was generous to the wider community. Babs Moossa must take particular credit for demonstrating that pancreatectomy for cancer was a practical way forward at a time when a series of poor results from non-specialised centres was showing unacceptably high mortality rates. He wrote a number of books, but the one that had a huge impact was a monograph on pancreatic cancer way ahead of its time and still one of the best expositions of pancreatic anatomy ever written (*Tumours of the pancreas*. Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore, Maryland, 1980). As part of the UCSD hearts and scholars programme, he established the AR Moossa scholarship for medical students. The AR Moossa service is one of the designated surgical services at the UCSD Veterans Administration Hospital. There is an AR Moossa named lab at the Anti-Cancer Research Foundation, San Diego, and an annual AR Moossa memorial lecture in Kuwait. Babs achieved many international honours and distinctions, but maintained his strong links with the UK, being awarded an honorary doctorate in medicine by the University of Liverpool in 1990. He was a special guest of the North West Surgical Society in 2005. He had a great love for British motor cars and also for horse racing. One of his syndicate horses, Heritage, won the King George V Handicap Royal Ascot race in 1997, and all three of his horses regularly seen at Del Mar Racetrack, San Diego, have proven to be winners (Moossa's Girl, Crowning Moossa and Babs Moossa). There are two race cups at the Mauritius racetrack named Moossa, one after his father and, since 2014, one named after him. Babs died on 17 July 2013, aged 73. He was survived by his wife Denise 'Dee' (née Willoughby), whom he married in Liverpool in 1973, and their four children - Pierre Willoughby, Noel Sebastien, Claude Elisabeth and Valentine Maud.
Resource Identifier RCS: E006127
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset