Sir Hugh Cairns: The Neurosurgeon Who Introduced Crash Helmets

Lawrence of Arabia, Sir Hugh Cairns, and the origin of motorcycle helmets.

When Colonel T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident in May 1935, one of the several doctors attending him was a young neurosurgeon, Hugh Cairns. He was moved by the tragedy in a way that was to have far-reaching consequences. At the beginning of the Second World War, he highlighted the unnecessary loss of life among army motorcycle dispatch riders as a...

Re: Hugh Cairns and the origin of British neurosurgery.

Sir Hugh Cairns, the first Nuffield Professor of Surgery in Oxford and consultant neurosurgeon to the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II, was a leader in helping to establish neurosurgery as a speciality in Britain. After learning the craft from Dr Harvey Cushing in Boston, Cairns fought against the general surgical orthodoxy in London to establish the first specialised neurosurgical ...

The Cairns memorial lecture: the Cairns tradition.

The aims embedded in the activities of the Sir Hugh Cairns Memorial Trust-to stimulate original work, to enable young people to travel and be exposed to work going on in centres overseas, and to prevent the isolation of neurosurgery from the wider aspects ofmedicine, reflect many of Sir Hugh Cairns' own precepts. It is therefore suitable to review some aspects of his personality and life-work, ...

Sir Charles Bell: The artist who went to the roots!

Psychiatrists, Neurologists and the Neurosurgeon *

Permit me at once to convey Yale's greetings to McGill on the occasion of this highly significant ceremony. At the same time, since I have been asked to speak briefly about the surgery of the nervous system, I may, unsolicited, venture to bring to you the felicitations of the enlarging group of surgeons who restrict themselves to this specialty in our two adjoining countries. The frontiers whic...