FIRST BRAIN SURGERY

Taranaki Daily News, 21 January 1935, Page 11

FIRST BRAIN SURGERY

SKULL OPENED WITH A CHISEL. OPERATION FIFTY YEARS AGO. A quiet-voiced young surgeon leaned over an operating table in the theatre of the Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis in Maida Vale, London, recently. In one hand he held a human skull; in the other a small hammer. “And then,” he told the audience around him, “the skull was chiselled open.” The watchers shuddered. The surgeon was Mr. Wylie McKissock, a brain specialist. He was explaining how the first operation on the human biain was carried out. It took place almost exactly 50 years ago in the same hospital. It thrilled the world. Up to that time it had been thought impossible to operate on the brain without causing the instant death of the patient. In 1884 a Scots crofter, Alexander Henderson of Dumfries, came to London. He was paralysed, and likely to die from a tumour on the brain. Mr Rickman Godlee, then surgeon to the hospital, decided to try an operation. Henderson agreed. The operation was performed. The medical world was astounded. A man’s skull had been chiselled open, bis

very brain tampered with, and still he lived! From that time operations on the brain became frequent, but the mortality was high owing to lack of proper antiseptic precautions. To-day the mortality is as low as 12 ‘ per cent.