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, particularly in terms of their relevance to the training of neurosurgeons. For, sadly, there now remain relatively few who worked with him, and he is only a name to the younger generations. Cairns was born at Port Pirie, South Australia, on the 26th June 1896. His father had emigrated from Scotland on medical advice, as it had been suspected that he was suffering from tuberculosis. Cairns obtained a bursary to Adelaide High School and an Exhibition to the University but his medical studies were interrupted by the first World War. He joined the Australian Army Medical Corps as a private, and was posted to the Mediterranean theatre, where the Gallipoli campaign was in progress. However, he caught typhoid and when No 3 Australian General Hospital was withdrawn from Lemnos, he was allowed to return home to Australia to continue his medical training. On qualifying he rejoined the Australian Army Medical Corps and was posted as a Regimental Medical Officer to an English battalion in France, where he served until the end of the war. A Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford to work on anatomy and physiology. I know nothing of his studies at this period, but, exceptionally for him, he was not completely occupied with work, for he found time to marry one of the daughters of the Master of his College, Balliol, of which he himself later became a fellow. He also rowed for the University in the boat race of 1920 (which was won by Cambridge), and then held resident posts at the Radcliffe Infirmary. In 1921 he went to the London Hospital, where he was house surgeon to Sir Henry Souttar and house physician to Sir Robert Hutchison. It was there that Professor Turnbull stimulated in him a lasting interest in pathology. In 1925 Cairns gave a Hunterian Lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons on testicular tumours, and he wrote an important paper on the inheritance of polycystic disease of the kidneys,3 which clearly established the familial nature of that condition for the first time. According to Clark-Kennedy,'9 Souttar occasionally operated on the brain. It may have been this, together with inspiration derived from the writings of Harvey Cushing, that encouraged Hugh Cairns to go to Boston in 1926, on a Rockefeller Fellowship, to work with Cushing at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. The year which he spent there was to be of great importance; it set him on the road to a neurosurgical career, established friendships that lasted throughout his life and coloured his future aims and practices. While I was in Boston some twenty five years later and