'Mrs L.'s case': a celebrated South Australian surgical case
| Autor: | R. G. Elmslie |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1991 |
| Předmět: |
Internal hernia
medicine.medical_specialty business.industry Watson General surgery education Select committee History 19th Century General Medicine Femoral hernia medicine.disease Hernia Femoral Surgery Royal Commission Consulting surgeon General Surgery South Australia medicine Complaint Humans business Hospitals Teaching Clinical teaching Intestinal Obstruction |
| Zdroj: | The Australian and New Zealand journal of surgery. 61(10) |
| ISSN: | 0004-8682 |
| Popis: | This paper concerns a dispute at the adelaide hospital in september 1896 between professor archibald watson, pathologist, honorary consulting surgeon and sole remaining university teacher at the hospital, and alexander disney leith napier. Who had arrived from england to fill the place of the honorary surgeons who had resigned from the hospital. Watson accused napier of incompetence in his management of ‘mrs l.’, who died after a femoral hernia operation. Mrs l had a form of internal hernia causing intestinal obstruction, whereas all the medical attendants, including watson, originally thought an old femoral hernia was the cause of her illness. By fortuitous coincidence the operation on the femoral hernia could have cured the internal hernia if the band of omentum attached to the femoral hernia had been divided. Watson became aware of the band at the post-mortem and then asserted that the operation should have taken it into account. Napier complained to the board of the hospital, alleging that watson had misrepresented the facts when he conducted the post-mortem on the patient and that he was disloyal to the hospital. The board found the complaint proved and invited watson to resign; he declined and was dismissed. Undaunted, watson circulated a privately printed pamphlet (entitled ‘mrs l.'s case’), which re-stated the events of the case and graphically described his post-mortem findings. It was submitted to the chairman of a select committee of the legislative council of south australia established to review the running of the hospital. The committee recommended the setting up of a royal commission but the government let the matter lapse. The opportunity for continued clinical teaching of students at the adelaide hospital, already poor when this dispute started, was lost. Only the balm of time and the spirit of compromise healed the rift and allowed clinical teaching to begin again in 1900. The lessons in this cautionary tale are considered. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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