NOTED SURGEON

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 74, 29 March 1939, Page 19

NOTED SURGEON

ROYAL APPOINTMENT

SIR A. WEBB-JOHNSON

VISIT TO NEW ZEALAND

One of the Surgeons to Queen Mary since her Majesty established a separate household on the death of King George V, Sir Alfred Webb-Johnson, C.8.E., D.5.0., of London, arrived with Lady Webb-Johnson by the Awatea from Sydney yesterday afternoon. They will spend a week in New Zealand before returning to England from Auckland.

Sir Alfred delivered: the Syme Oration, at the recent: congress of the Australasian; College of Surgeons held- at Melbourne, his subject, being "Surgery in England in the Making." Later at Canberra he gave the Mackenzie Oration at the Mackenzie Institute of Anatomy. This evening he will address a gathering of Wellington surgeons on the history of surgery in England.

In. an. interview Sir Alfred; said that he thought the biggest-advance in surgery since the Great. War, and to a certain extent as a result of the war, was operative surgery of the chest. Chest wounds rather than, gassing were responsible for the advances made.

TREATMENT OF CANCER. So fas as cancer was concerned, as he had stressed in the Mackenzie Oration, the most important thing at the moment was for people not to have a dread of the disease but to seek advice as early as possible; only then could they be hopeful of successful treatment. The greatest advance in recent years in cancer work was in radium and X-ray treatment, and they all looked forward with hope to the possibilities in the use of neutron rays. Professor E. O. Lawrence, of California, had invented a machine called the cycletron which produced neutron rays, which were many times more powerful than X-rays or radium. It was hoped that by being combined with various chemical elements they might have a selective action on tumours in different parts of the body. For instance, it was surmised that if the rays were combined with phosphorus the radio-active phosphorus salt might find its way to the bones and act directly on the tumours. The*research in this ah-dction was all in the experimental stage, and cancer research workers all over the world were busily engaged in investigating the possibilities. The important thing to be worked out first was the physical aspect, the exact measurement, so to speak, of the rays to be used be-, fore they were applied to animals and certainly before they were,applied to any human being. INCIDENCE OF DISEASE. Questioned as to the incidence of cancer today as compared with the past, Sir Alfred pointed out that, -because of reduced infantile mortality and the prevention of many diseases which formerly caused heavy mortality in youth, the average age of people had increased. It followed that more people reached the "cancer age" to-

day than was the case even 25 years ago. Sir Alfred received his knighthood in 1936 in the only Honours List issued in the reign of King Edward VIII. He served during the Great War and was three times mentioned in dispatches, receiving the C.B.E. and the D.S.O. He is a Fellow and member of the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a former member of the Court of Examiners. He is, in addition, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, an honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, surgeon to the Middlesex Hospital, a former Dean of the Medical School, consulting surgeon at Queen Alexandra's Military Hospital, London, and the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, an honorary colonel of the Army Medical Service, and a Knight of Grace of St. John of Jerusalem.