TUMOURS OF BRAIN

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 255, 25 September 1935, Page 12

TUMOURS OF BRAIN

REMARKABLE SURGERY. The first operation for the removal of a tumour of the brain was performed ."> 1 years ago. The effects of these tumours had long been known—headaches, fits, paralysis, loss of vision—but the possibilities of surgery had not been conceived, and the patient was doomed to certain death, usually preceded by a prolonged period of suffering. . Professor Edwin Bramwell, who spoke at a meeting of the section of neurology and psychological medicine, at the B.M.A. Conference. in Melbourne. with a paper on “Tho Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Treatment of Brain Tumours 50 Years Ago and How,” described how the operative mortality in attempts to remove brain .tumours’ had • been reduced from 25 per celit for the period ended 1912, to 4.4 per cent for tbo period from July, 1928. to Jttlv, 1931 HISTORIC OPERATION.

The first operation for the removal of a tumour was not without its pathetic side, he stated. A young farmer came under the care of Dr Hughes Bennett. Dr Hughes Bennett’s father, a distinguished surgeon and physician, died a few years earlier, and it was found after his death that he was suffering from an unsuspected tumour of the brain. Dr Hughes Bennett, therefore, was deeply interested in the complaint, and he persuaded a surgeon, Rickman Godlee, to operate. The operation was successful. Following this first successful attempt, physicians turned their attention more and more to brain tumours. There were at first great difficulties of diagnosis, but these were gradually overcome. The mortality after operation was, however, exceedingly high. At the meeting of the B.M.A. in Edinburgh in 1898. David Ferricr, opening a discussion, said that the treatment of brain tumours was a melancholy chapter in therapeutics. Only seven per cent of cases, he thought, could be successfully dealt with.

Professor Bramwell said that when he was a house physician at tlie National Hospital, the diagnosis in cases of brain tumours had reached a high degree of excellence, but tho surgical side of the picture was a gruesome one. The removal of the tumour and the subsequent recovery of a patient was in those days a rare event. “Even in eases where patients recovered and lived for a year or more, one sometimes wondered whether death on the operating table would not have been a preferable ending,” Professor Bramwell said. NOTABLE ADVANCES.

“In the first decade of the present century remarkable strides were made in neurology, and considerable improvement followed in the diagnosis of brain tumours. Surgery still lagged behind, but advances in surgical technique were made,and, by 1910, Cushing was able to report a somewhat reduced mortality rate.” Professor Bramwell continued that since the Great War there had been notable advances. Radiological developments of the greatest value in diagnosis were introduced and surgical technique had made great strides. He quoted the figures given by Harvey Cushing, the pioneer of tlie • surgery of tho brain, relating to operative mortality in 2000 cases of verified brain tumours. These figures showed that the mortality percentage had decreased in the case of one important class of tumour from 25 per cent for the period ended 1912, to 11.6 for the period ended 1929, and to 4.4 for the three-year period 1923 to 1931.