Sir Frederick Treves, Bart / [W.R. Bett].

  • Bett, W. R. (Walter Reginald), 1903-
Date:
[1953]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sir Frederick Treves, Bart / [W.R. Bett]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    3/8 (page 3)
    SIR FREDERICK TREVES, Bart. (1853-1923)* by W. R. Bett, M.R.C.S. To-night we are assembled to celebrate the centenary of one whose name will live not only in the history of surgery, but in the history of England. It was in our anatomy days that the name Treves first came to our ear. Were we not constantly reminded by one of the least porno¬ graphic mnemonics of our youth that “ Treves is an excellent surgeon, especially in peritonitis,” or “ except in piles ” ? The slight variation depended upon the school in which we were trained or upon our personal tastes. The bare facts of Treves’s career may briefly be recalled, for it is the great surgeon, the fine anatomist, the entertaining writer, and the picturesque man, who interests us this evening. Sprung from old Dorset yeoman stock, Frederick Treves was born in Dorchester on February 15, 1853, the son of an upholsterer, and was educated at a school kept by the Rev. William Barnes, the Dorset poet, and subsequently at Merchant Taylors’ School. He entered the London Hospital as a student in 1871, and obtained the L.S.A. in 1874 and the M.R.C.S. a year later. He took the F.R.C.S. in 1878 and in the following year was appointed surgical registrar at the hospital. His promotion was extremely rapid, for that same year he was elected assistant surgeon, and full surgeon five years later, at the early age of 31. While building up a consulting practice, he augmented his income by becoming demonstrator of anatomy in the medical school. He was lecturer on anatomy from 1884 to 1893, and lecturer on surgery from 1894 to 1897. In the “ nineties ” Treves was the best-known and most successful surgeon in London and possibly in England, and he received the upper- limit fee of 100 guineas more often than any of his colleagues. His private practice became so embarrassingly extensive that he resigned the post of surgeon to the London Hospital in 1898, at the age of 45—a step undoubtedly to his financial advantage, but he gradually ceased to be recognized as the leader of English surgery. THE ANATOMIST Treves excelled as a teacher of anatomy, for he combined a keen sense of the practical with a clear, incisive style and a genius for the telling and humorous phrase, which stuck in the students’ memory. Listen to his delightful comment upon the bony deposits on the surface of the skull in hereditary syphilis (I quote from the 6th edition of his Surgical applied anatomy, 1911):—“They have been termed ‘ natiform elevations’ by M. Parrot from their supposed resemblance, when viewed collectively, * Based on an address given to the Section of Surgery, Royal Society of Medicine, on January 7, 1953.