Surgeon Closes Hospital

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31770, 29 August 1968, Page 3

Surgeon Closes Hospital

Early this year the Bassam Hospital in Lower Hutt closed its doors and ended a unique demonstration of mother-nursing.

Dr Cecily Pickerill, who as a plastic surgeon worked to correct birth deformities and blemishes in babies and young children, has retired after 28 years at Bassam—and there is noone to carry on her work.

Bassam was opened as a rooming-in hospital where the mothers who brought their babies for delicate repair surgery remained to care for them.

At the eight-bed hospital Dr H. P. Pickerill, senior plastic surgeon at Wellington Hospital, and his wife, Dr Cecily Pickerill, were able to

demonstrate that plastic surgery on infants—previously regarded as hazardous and uncertain—could be carried out successfully and without psychological traumas when every baby was nursed by its own mother, said an article in the August bulletin of the Federation of Parents’ Centres.

In 1949, writing in the British Journal of Plastic Surgery, Dr Cecily Pickerill said:—

"After 11 years of operating on babies exclusively with

mother-nursing 1 am quite satisfied that the method gives results not obtainable otherwise.

“The greatest advantage of all is in the absence of cross infection. That so simple a thing as confining the nursing to the child’s own mother in a single robm should eliminate this bugbear of infant surgery was almost too much to hope for—yet it has turned out to be a fact.

“Since Bassam was fully established I have not had a single case of cross infection, and I use no post-operative antiseptics, no routine antibiotics, no elaborate sprays, and no oiling of floors or bedclothes.” Dr Cecily Pickerill, a graduate of Otago University, began her training'in plastic surgery 40 years ago when

it was a comparatively new field. She learned from her husband, who had been a plastic surgeon in England during World War I; and in World War II she worked beside him on casualties that were mainly burn scars. But gradually she turned to work with children. It was in the repair of the cleft palate and harelip deformities that the busband-and-wife team gained world recognition. Writing on surgery for the cleft palate, which she believes should begin at 10 or 12 weeks of age, she says:— “To separate a baby from his mother at this tender age, when it has to undergo a series of difficult operations, is seeking trouble and courting failure. In 95 per cent of cases the mother makes an excellent nurse.”

Writing in the New Zealand Nursing Journal in August, 1942, her husband described the mother’s role in the final palate-closing operation for an infant with a cleft palate: “Someone has to be in constant watch over the baby night and day, ready to pick it up and nurse it, comfort it, give it sips of drink at any moment at the first indication of crossness or crying; and the best person in the world to do this is the baby’s own mother.”

After the death of her husband Dr Cecily Pickerill carried on the work at Bassam Hospital. No record was kept of the number of her patients, but last year there were nearly 400 and thousands must thank her for the chance to live a normal life. She travelled widely to lecture and teach and held clinics throughout New Zealand. Retired now to her three-acre property in Silverstream, she speaks with regret of the closing of Bassam with its living-in room for mothers and babies.