Pediatric Surgery: in Retrospect and Prospect

COMING as I do of Ulster stock, it is for me a signal honour to be called upon to pay tribute, on your behalf as well as my own, to the memory of a great Ulster surgeon, Robert Campbell. Some of you, I know, knew personally this tall, genial, sandy-haired Irishman of the commanding presence, the quiet voice, the alert mind, the boyish enthusiasm, and the gentle, capable hands. But many had not that privilege. Robert Campbell loved children. He understood their ways and he studied their needs. His work at the Children's Hospital here came to be not only a great joy to himself, and an inspiration, as I well know, to his successors in Belfast, but also a matter of no small significance to children's surgery everywhere. Robert Campbell was, in fact, one of the pioneers who, in the earlier years of this century, laid the foundations of modern pediatric surgery. Many of his views, particularly about the nursing and care of children, were far in advance of his time. To-day they are orthodox practice. In 1920 Campbell handed on the torch to us, and it has seemed to me appropriate to take a look at how we have tended it and how it may fare in the future. Surgery, in all branches, has made astounding advances since Campbell's day, and the surgery of childhood has in no way lagged behind. Let us begin by considering some of the things which have signified most to children in this tale of progress. 1. SOCIAL CHANGE. When I first went to Great Ormond Street in 1912 a large proportion of our patients were still barefooted, ragged, and often homeless little waifs. We were sadly cluttered with the surgery of dirt and malnutrition, and with the appalling sepsis, abscesses, cellulitis, acute bone and joint disease, rickets, tuberculosis, congenital syphilis. By 1920 this was, of course, already passing, and to-day these