First Title value, for Searching Hamilton, David Ian (1931 - 2017)

2024-05-22T18:02:21Z

by James Wilkinson
Publication Date 2017-12-13 2018-01-24
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E009000-E009999/E009300-E009399
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/381580381580
Occupation Cardiac surgeon Paediatric cardiac surgeon
Details David Hamilton was a surgeon whose major interest became surgery for congenital heart defects. He built up an outstanding department at the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital and was the foundation professor of cardiac surgery at Edinburgh. He was born on 22 June 1931 to John Alexander King Hamilton (known as Jack) and Helen Eliza Bruce Hamilton née Kirk, and spent his early years in Middlesbrough. His father, a Quaker, had served as a noncombatant ambulance driver for the French Red Cross during the First World War and was awarded a George medal for defusing an unexploded bomb. He later worked as a civil engineer specialising in bridge building. David's mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, was a 'child of the manse' who trained as a nurse in Edinburgh. During the construction of Wandsworth bridge, the family moved to London, where they lived in Wimbledon. David went to King's College Junior School and then Leighton Park School (a Quaker school) in Reading. He developed a major interest in sport and became an enthusiastic rugby player, also playing cricket and tennis - and later golf. He was a member of the first XI cricket team at Leighton Park for four years, being a fine batsman and an excellent slip fielder. He played in an English schools rugby XV against a French schools' team in 1949. During National Service, he played rugby for the Royal Corps of Signals. While still at school he befriended Myra McAra, the daughter of the minister of the Presbyterian church in Wimbledon (also a 'child of the manse'). Their first date was for a game of golf. They married after he completed his studies at the Middlesex Hospital in 1957 and both died, in the same nursing home, in 2017 after almost 60 years of marriage. After National Service, he went to the Middlesex Hospital Medical School. In this pre-ultrasound and sophisticated imaging era, he acquired a sound basis of clinical skills. He had decided on a career in surgery as it would allow him to use the manual skills that he had learned during childhood from his father, an expert handyman. He therefore became an anatomy demonstrator and took his primary FRCS, passing at the first attempt, and went on to pass the final FRCS (again at the first attempt) in 1961. His early surgical experience included a rotation with Sir Thomas Holmes Sellors, which aroused his interest in cardiothoracic surgery. Sir Thomas tempted him to continue in that area of surgery and he went on to a term at Harefield Hospital, before applying for a senior registrar position in Liverpool, which started in 1965. Overseas training from 1966 to 1967 took him to California, to the Presbyterian Medical Center, San Francisco, with Frank Gerbode. Soon after returning to Liverpool in 1968, he was appointed to a newly-created full-time consultant post at Broadgreen Hospital. This appointment gave him the opportunity to expand his work into surgery for congenital heart disease at the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital, Myrtle Street. This work was greatly aided by Gordon Jackson (Jack) Rees and the anaesthetic team, and achieved a national and international reputation, supported further by anatomical studies of congenitally malformed hearts by Bob Anderson, Jim Wilkinson and others in the Institute of Child Health at Alder Hey Hospital. David had been the inspiration for these now famous anatomical studies, having encouraged Bob Anderson to examine the conducting tissue in the heart of a child who had died after developing heart block, following surgery for an atrioventricular septal defect. His research activities, while in San Francisco, had involved tissue valves, and he developed a major interest in the use of homograft and heterograft valves. He visited Green Lane Hospital in Auckland in 1969 and was impressed by the work that was being performed by the team under Brian (later Sir Brian) Barratt-Boyes with deep hypothermic circulatory arrest. With Jackson Rees, he developed a technique of core cooling, which became the standard practice for deep hypothermia in Liverpool and in many other centres, rather than the surface cooling, which had been developed in Auckland in the 1960's. His time in Liverpool saw the arrival of prostaglandin as a means of palliation for sick infants with critical coronary heart disease and the introduction of two-dimensional echocardiography. Both of these changes brought a huge change to the management and outcomes for affected infants. The introduction of prostaglandin E to initial treatment was, he said, the basis of a substantial reduction in his golf handicap, as the need for emergency surgical intervention was greatly reduced! David inspired and guided many trainees from home and abroad, especially from Poland, where he developed a strong link, travelling thither on many occasions over about 15 years from the late 70's and throughout the 1980's. In 1986, David was appointed to the foundation chair of cardiac surgery in Edinburgh. He continued in that position until his retirement in 1993. He was president of the Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland in 1993. David was a skillful surgeon and an excellent teacher. He was gentle, unassuming, modest, self-disciplined and inspired by the Quaker values of strength without aggression and gentleness without weakness. His main leisure activities during retirement involved music (always a passion) and golf, which he continued to play until nearly 80. In his later years he became increasingly incapacitated by Parkinson's disease. David died on 6 October 2017 at the age of 86. He and Myra were survived by their sons James, Alastair and Ross. Their first son, Ian, predeceased them in 2016.
Resource Identifier RCS: E009397
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching De Leval, Marc Roger (1941 - 2022)

2024-05-22T18:02:21Z

by Sarah Gillam
Publication Date 2022-08-26
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E010000-E010999/E010100-E010199
Occupation Cardiothoracic Surgeon Paediatric cardiac surgeon Cardiac surgeon
Details Professor Marc de Leval, a leading paediatric heart surgeon, established the heart transplant unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, and was a pioneer of patient safety and risk management research. He was born on 16 April 1941 in the village of Charneux in Belgium, the eldest of seven children of Julien and Anne-Marie de Leval. His father and grandfather were both general practitioners. De Leval studied medicine at the University of Liege and qualified in 1966. He completed a residency in internal medicine and then trained at Liege for three years in general surgery. He decided to specialise in cardiac surgery and from 1970 spent two years as a fellow at the Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco under Frank Gerbode, a prominent cardiac surgeon. De Leval was subsequently appointed as a senior surgical registrar at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where he worked under David Waterston and Jaroslav Stark. He was awarded the Evarts A Graham Memorial travelling fellowship of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and spent 1973 to 1974 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he worked with Robert Wallace, Dwight McGoon and Gordon Danielson. In 1974 he returned to Great Ormond Street as a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon. In 1988 he established the heart and heart and lung transplant programmes at the hospital. He also carried out the first paediatric heart transplant there. He chaired the hospital’s cardiorespiratory and critical care division from 2003 to 2005. In mid-career, after more than 50 successful arterial switch operations, he suddenly found that some of his young patients were dying following surgery. Showing exceptional humility, he decided to review his techniques, analyse his results and retrain, working with the statistician David Spiegelhalter. The 1994 paper they co-wrote concluded there was ‘an indication of suboptimal performance that appears to be neutralised by retraining’ (‘Analysis of a cluster of surgical failures. Application to a series of neonatal arterial switch operations’ *J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg*. 1994 Mar;107[3]:914-23). After retraining, 34 of his next 35 operations were successful. He argued constantly that surgeons needed to analyse their results. He researched innovative ways of reducing risk and increasing patient safety; he worked with Formula One to determine the management of pitstops, applying his findings to improve transfers from operating theatres, and studied data on plane ‘near misses’ collected by the Civil Aviation Authority. He was an adviser for the inquiry into child heart surgery at Bristol Royal Infirmary. He developed a series of innovative surgical procedures, including the ‘Great Ormond shunt’, used to treat a complex defect, ‘the blue baby with tetralogy of Fallot’. He published more than 300 papers and was editor of the influential textbook *Surgery for congenital heart defects* (London, Grune & Stratton, 1983), now in its third edition. He also wrote an autobiography *Humanity & humility: 40 years in children’s heart surgery*, published in 2020. After retiring from the NHS in 2006 at the age of 65, he continued in private practice but had to stop working in 2010 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He was vice president of Chain of Hope, which provides heart treatment to children in 32 countries. In 2011 the American Association for Thoracic Surgery presented him with its scientific achievement award, its most prestigious honour. Outside medicine, he enjoyed fast cars and began each morning with a 5.30am swim. De Leval died from complications of Parkinson’s disease and cardiac and neurological issues on 26 June 2022. He was 81. He was survived by his wife Véronique ‘Vicky’ (née Laumont) and their two daughters Nathalie and Fabienne.
Resource Identifier RCS: E010151
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

Search Results for Medical Obituaries - Narrowed by: Paediatric cardiac surgeon

First Title value, for Searching Hamilton, David Ian (1931 - 2017)

First Title value, for Searching De Leval, Marc Roger (1941 - 2022)