The Surgery of Pulmonary Tuberculosis

"Some there be, which have no memdrial: Who are perished, as if they had never been; And are become as if they had never been born." In this category of Ecclesiasticus, Robert Campbell was not to be placed, for such was the esteem in which he was held by his colleagues, that his memory has been perpetuated in a way which falls to the lot of a very few; in a Memorial Oration, which now it is my proud duty and privilege to deliver. I deem this occasion to be the greatest honour of my life, but I felt very humble when I was asked to deliver the Oration by Sir Thomas Houston, the secretary of the Committee, who is now, alas ! the only survivor of the original trustees, Long may he continue. One of Robert Campbell's greatest friends, and mine also, Dr. James Moore, was the last of the trustees to cross the bourne. Someone has said that no one knew a man better than his house-surgeon, so I should know what Robert Campbell was like, for I was both a pupil in his wards, and later his house-surgeon. I can see him as clearly now as then: a tall, austere figure, stalking slowly and deliberately down the hospital corridor: but his forbidding exterior covered a very kindly heart, as I quickly learned, even as a timid pupil. He was a man of very few words when I knew him, but I learned more from his silence and his precepts of action than I could have learnt from one much more voluble, for it was infriguing to find out, from many sources, why he did certain things, and arrived at certain diagnoses. When he did talk, his teaching was remarkable for its concise and logical presentation; but he was at his best sitting over a cup of tea in the ward kitchen, discussing surgical and other matters with a fascinating clarity and breadth of vision. An amusing couplet was made about him in the hospital alphabet"R stands for Robert, whom you know, boys and girls, Does not believe in the casting of pearls." Robert Campbell had a great brain and was a most original thinker: he was no follower of fashion. He was the first clearly to distinguish the acute mechanical obstruction of the appendix from the acute inflammation, and on this very platform, in the year 1912, read a paper to this Society on that subject. He will be remembered, too, for his pioneer work on hernia, and showed that it was possible to do a radicaT cure in the youngest infant. His series' of cases reached 1,500, with only one death, and that one from delayed chloroform poisoning, which cause of death he was one of the first to attach importance to.