SIR VICTOR HORSLEY

Sir Victor Horsley.

MANY years ago G. K. Chesterton called the English 'the eccentrics of the earth' because of their unawareness of the 'very existence of some of their most extraordinary claims to glory and distinction'. He referred to a neglect of Chaucer the Father of English Poetry but today, with science in the ascendant, his stricture may be applied to the medical profession for allowing obscurity to threat...

Sir Victor Horsley (1857-1916): pioneer of neurological surgery.

Immortalized in surgical history for the introduction of "antiseptic wax," Sir Victor Horsley played a pivotal role in shaping the face of standard neurosurgical practice. His contributions include the first laminectomy for spinal neoplasm, the first carotid ligation for cerebral aneurysm, the curved skin flap, the transcranial approach to the pituitary gland, intradural division of the trigemi...

Victor Horsley on "trephining in pre-historic times".

Victor Horsley was intrigued by newly discovered, ancient trepanned skulls, especially those that revealed that the operation was performed on living patients. He examined the man-made openings as an expert on the locus of the primate motor cortex and as a surgeon who had successfully removed parts of the motor cortex to treat Jacksonian epilepsy. He postulated that trepanation originated as a ...

Alcohol and Human Life: Being Partly a Revision of 'Alcohol and the Human Body', by the Late Sir Victor Horsley and the Late Dr. Mary Sturge and Others

One hundred years of epilepsy surgery: Sir Victor Horsley's contribution.

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same" (Kipling, "If', 1910)' On May 25th, 1886, Victor Horsley, then aged 29 years, another brilliant recent recruit to the burgeoning National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic in Queen Square, performed his first brain operation on a patient.2 There was no tradition of neurological surgery, so there could...