Rickman Godlee

Rickman Godlee

Rickman John Godlee (born February 15, 1849 in Upton (London) , † April 18, 1925 in Whitchurch-on-Thames , Berkshire ) was a British surgeon and pioneer of brain surgery. He was one of the first to remove a brain tumor in 1884.

Life

Godlee came from a Quaker family. His father of the same name was a lawyer, his mother Mary the sister of the famous surgeon Joseph Lister . Godlee attended a Quaker school in Tottenham and graduated from University College London with a BA in 1867. He then began to study medicine. As a student he made drawings for Quain's anatomy textbook (he was an excellent draftsman). In 1872 he became a member and in 1876 a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England . He had previously received gold medals in the Bachelor's degree in Medicine (1872 MB) and Master's degree in Surgery (1873, MS) and Surgery at the University of London. He was House Surgeon and House Physician at University College Hospital in London with John Eric Erichsen, for whom he also made drawings for his surgery textbook, before he went to Edinburgh in 1872 to study with his uncle Joseph Lister. There he got to know antiseptic methods, about which he published in the Lancet in 1878. Back in London he was registrar at University College Hospital, he became assistant surgeon (Assistant Surgeon) at Charing Cross Hospital in 1876 and lecturer in anatomy at the Medical School, both of which he gave up in 1878. Also from 1876 he was a surgeon at the North Eastern Children's Hospital. In 1877 he became an assistant surgeon at University College Hospital and an assistant demonstrator in anatomy at University College. From 1876 he began working there on his anatomy atlas, for which he made the drawings himself after about 100 anatomical sections he had made.

In 1884 he became a surgeon at Brompton Hospital for Lung Diseases in London, which he remained until 1900. For several years he was Lister's private assistant. In 1885 he became a surgeon at University College Hospital, which he remained until 1914. In 1892 he succeeded his cousin Marcus Beck Professor of Clinical Surgery at University College and in 1900 he succeeded Christopher Heath Holme Professor . In 1920 he moved from London to Whitchurch-on-Thames, where he had owned a farm on the banks of the Thames for a long time.

He was also the royal surgeon for Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V. In 1912 he became a baron and in 1914 Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO). He was examiner in anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons from 1884, was their Bradshaw Lecturer in 1907 and Hunterian Orator in 1913 and served on the Council from 1897. From 1911 to 1913 he was President of the Royal College of Surgeons and from 1916 to 1917 of the Royal Society of Medicine. During the First World War he was in charge of the Belgian Medical Support Fund.

In 1876 he observed an abscess on the shin with a camera lucida and made drawings of microscopic objects arranged like a chain ( streptococci ), which he did not name.

On November 25, 1884, he undertook the first stereotactic brain operation to remove a brain tumor at the Epileptic Hospital in Regent's Park. The neurologist Alexander Hughes Bennett (1848-1901) had previously localized the location of the tumor in the 25-year-old patient. The operation was technically successful (the location of the tumor was correctly diagnosed), but the patient died of complications after the operation.

In 1891 he married Mary Seebohm. The marriage remained childless.

He published a biography of his uncle Joseph Lister, whom he greatly admired and whose assistant he was for many years. He was well educated and an honorary librarian of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society, later the Royal Society of Medicine. In 1926 his book about Whitchurch where he lived was published posthumously.

According to the Times obituary of April 21, 1925, he was reserved, sarcastic, and often underrated by people who knew him only superficially. He was interested in botany and ornithology , was gifted with languages, wrote poetry, carpentered and rowed. He was very conscientious and did not take anything for granted that he had not examined himself.

Fonts

• Lord Lister, London 1917, 3rd edition Oxford 1924 (German edition 1925)
• Editor: The collected papers of Joseph, Baron Lister, 2 volumes, Oxford 1909
• An Atlas of Human Anatomy, London, 1877/78 (part I-IV), 1880 (complete edition)
• with James Kingston Fowler: The diseases of the lungs, London, New York 1898

He edited the 6th and 7th editions of Heath's Practical Anatomy.

Web links

• Biography at the Royal College of Surgeons (Plarr's life of the Fellows)

.