The lecturers on surgery at St. Bartholomew's Hospital 1731-1906.

  • Power, D'Arcy, 1855-1941.
Date:
[1907]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The lecturers on surgery at St. Bartholomew's Hospital 1731-1906. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    of the rest from the structure of the parts, instruments used, methods of using them, etc. After the operation I shall demonstrate and describe the dressings and the method of applying them ; then give a short account of what’s most material to be observed in the case. If these suggestions were followed out—and we know that they were by Samuel Sharp at Guy’s and in all proba- bility by Edward Nourse in this school—the teaching of surgery from 1730 to 1745, when Pott began to lecture, was on the same lines as that of our present class of operative surgery. There was no systematic teaching, because as yet thfeie were no general principles, for surgery in England had hardly yet emerged from the status of a handicraft except for a few individuals. Percivall Pott. Percivall Pott, our second lecturer, is as real a personage as Nourse is shadowy. The beautiful portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds which hangs in the Great Hall reveals him to us as he was late in life. I like to look at it and to think that he carried on the traditions of Woodall and Wiseman, that it was mainly by his work and by his blameless life that surgery became a profession and that English surgeons became gentlemen. Pott was born, a Londoner, in 1714, and was apprenticed to Edward Nourse in 1729. He took the Great Diploma of the United Company of Barbers and Surgeons in 1736, and was appointed Assistant Surgeon to this hospital on March 14th, 1744, becoming full Surgeon on November 30th, 1749. He died in 1788—a little more than a year after he had resigned the office of Surgeon. Pott introduced many improvements into the art of surgery during his long tenure of office in this hospital, rendering the practice more humane both to the patient and the surgeon. When he became surgeon in 1774 the cauteries were heated as soon as he entered the ward because they were in constant use for stopping bleeding, for searing wounds and to produce issues. Pott advocated less brutal measures, but he was only successful after a long struggle. Pott’s world-renowned teaching began quite humbly. He used to invite his dressers to come round to his house in Watling Street and talk over the cases they had just seen in the wards. The pupils liked it and brought their friends to listen, and thus hie reputation grew steadily, but it was not until Nourse died in 1761 that the lectures which had been delivered privately and at his own house were first delivered in public at the hospital. They were given at the beginning with hesitation and some difficulty, like the lectures of John Hunter and Abernethy in the early days, but later with more complete ease and with the applause of the whole medical world. They soon became the fashion and were attended not only by the medical students of London but by those from Edinburgh and Dublin, as well as by such foreign surgeons as happened to be staying in England from time to time. The name