South Australian Hugh Cairns, Oxford surgery professor/brigadier's head care saves world war lives by thousands
As a brigadier in the British army medical corp during World War II, Hugh Cairns introduced compulsory helmets for motorcycle dispatch riders and mobile neurosurgical units for the battlefields.
Hugh Cairns – Howard Florey’s predecessor as a Rhodes scholar from Adelaide University – had built up such an international repute as a neurosurgeon that he was flown immediately to treat figures such as American general George S. Patton in 1946 during World War II.
But Cairns, who went from Oxford professor to brigadier in the British Army medical corp during the war, had a much broader effect on bringing neurosurgery to treating head trauma during battle, saving thousands of lives.
Cairns designed mobile neurosurgical units with neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, and ophthalmic surgeons. He also created the combined services hospital for head injuries at Oxford. Cairns also introduced the compulsory crash helmets for dispatch motorcycle riders and cut their rate mortality by more than 50%.
The war had interrupted Cairns tenure of the first in the Nuffield chair of surgery at Oxford from 1937 and being elected a professorial fellow of Balliol College. Cairns left the London clinic in good hands, characteristically taking copies of his case records, clinical photographs and pathological material with him. He was a pioneer in employing a medical artist in his theatres during 18 creative months.
During the war, when Cairns at once became adviser on head injuries to the ministry of health and neurosurgeon to the army, rising to brigadier. A new base hospital for head injuries was started at St Hugh's College where “The Nutcrackers Suite” became a neurological unit of prime importance.
Cairns was active in developing the use and technique of penicillin treatment developed at Oxford by Howard Florey. Having studied the technique of penicillin treatment of pneumococcal meningitis, and tuberculous meningitis with streptomycin, Cairns later became interested in leucotomy.
Knighted in 1946, Cairns was elected the next first year as Sims Commonwealth professor appointed by the Royal College and given the honorary degree of medicine by Adelaide University. He enthusiastically supported medical research starting at the Australian National University. He travelled widely and in his later years administrative and ambassadorial duties but he remained the “good doctor'”.
He also was active and a competitive tennis player and music lover. He believed himself to be “very normal” – a claim denied by his own excellence. He faced his own cancer stoically and died in the Radcliffe Infirmary in 1952.