Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

Geoffrey Wooler, FRCS

138 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery Geoffrey Wooler, FRCS (b. 1911) In London, a thoracic surgeon makes an incision in the chest, and he is confined to the chest. In Leeds, an operation may start in the chest, but the incision can be extended the full length of the body if necessary. I have seen the fundus of the bladder taken out through a chest incision. He [Vernon Thompson] just looked at me and said, “How frightful!” — On surgery at the General Infirmary at Leeds Interviewed June 10, 1997 My family has lived in Leeds for over 250 years. We have a marriage certificate between Hannah Wainwright and John Wooler dated December 22, 1778. We have a collection of certificates from that date until today: marriage certificates, baptisms, and all that nonsense. My father was a successful businessman, and he stabilized the finances of the family. My mother, unfortunately, was blind. She had picked up an infection when my brother, the first child, was born, and she lost her sight the following year. It was seven years before they decided to have another child. In 1911 I was the next child to arrive, and my sister came a year after I was born. I went to a private kindergarten school run by four spinsters, the Misses Newman. I had to be looked after by a nursemaid because of my mother’s disability, a maid called Winnie. Winnie taught me to sew, crochet, and knit at a very early age, and I would like to think that her tuition at that time had something to do with my success later in life as a surgeon. At nine years of age, I went to Leeds Grammar School, and then after that, at age thirteen I went to Giggleswick School. The headmaster, a Mr. Douglas, was a devout Christian, and we had prayers two or three times a day. I managed to get eleven credits in the school certificate, which was sufficient for me to be exempted from the Cambridge entrance examination. I still lacked a credit in Latin, so I had to take the exam again and managed to pass. I obtained a place at Selwyn College , Cambridge, but I had not made up my mind which subject to read. My brother had just become a lawyer in Leeds, and I thought I might be able to follow his example, so I put myself down for law. I was horrified to discover when you are reading law at Cambridge , you had to learn Roman law in Latin for the first two years. It was a subject that I hated, but our tutors said they wished us to be “cultured lawyers,” not just lawyers. It was during my third term, after I had been there for nearly a year, that I decided to change. One of my friends, John McKeller, had been at Giggleswick with me and afterwards at Selwyn College. One day he took me around the dissecting room and showed me the human body with all the dissected muscles . I thought this was fascinating, and I decided to give up law and change to medicine. I passed the second MB examination at Cambridge at the end of my third year and obtained a BA degree at the same time. In 1930 I went to the London Hospital to do my clinical work. My first dressership was to a Mr. Russell Howard, who would not change things unless he was really forced to. In the The Early Years 139 operating theatre, he still retained large cisterns of carbolic acid used in the Listerian period for irrigating wounds. He never changed clothes to do an operation, and in the operating theatre he wore a stiff collar, a waistcoat with a gold Albert pocketwatch and boots. He was also a farmer, so presumably that is why he liked to wear boots. All he did was to put on a large rubber apron to protect his clothing, his mask merely covering his chin, and then he would start scrubbing up. He was actually the senior surgeon at the London Hospital, was a great teacher, and taught me a lot about surgery. He used to say, “Surgery is anatomy, common sense, and nothing more.” The other surgeons at the London Hospital were really quite an eminent crowd. There was Sir Henry Souttar, who later flew out to India to operate on an Indian princess who had carcinoma of the tongue; Hugh Cairns, who became the Nuffield Professor...