Hugh Cairns Timeline

Hugh Cairns 26

1896 Hugh Cairns born in Port Pirie Port Pirie, Australia Son of a carpenter, in a lead-smelting town on the South Australian coast. He spent his early childhood in Riverton, where he had all his primary schooling.
1911 Dux of Adelaide High School Adelaide, Australia He edited the school journal in the same year, and went up to the University of Adelaide on an exhibition to read medicine.
1915 Enlists as a private Adelaide, Australia Cairns joined the Australian Imperial Force as a private in the Army Medical Corps, interrupting his medical degree. He served with the AIF before returning to finish it.
1919 Balliol College, Oxford Oxford, United Kingdom He arrived as a Rhodes Scholar from Adelaide, rowed bow for the university in the Boat Race, and was president of the Balliol boat club. He would spend the rest of his life in England.
1921 Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons London, United Kingdom He took the FRCS after a house year at the Radcliffe Infirmary and a move to the London Hospital, first in the pathology institute and then the surgical unit.
1921 He marries Barbara Forster Oxford, United Kingdom Youngest of the daughters of A. L. Smith, Master of Balliol — a connection that kept him tied to Oxford through the London years.
1926 – 1927 A year with Harvey Cushing Boston, United States A Rockefeller travelling fellowship took him to the man who had invented modern neurosurgery. Cairns came back determined to build the speciality in Britain, and spent the next decade copying Cushing's methods — the meticulous records, the photographs, the refusal to hurry.
1926 Hunterian Professor London, United Kingdom At thirty he lectured to the Royal College on testicular tumours and congenital cystic kidney. His interests at this stage were urological; neurosurgery came later and by accident.
1927 – 1937 The first neurosurgical unit in a London teaching hospital London, United Kingdom He fought the general surgeons, who held that any competent surgeon could open a skull, and set up a dedicated unit at the London Hospital. He employed a medical artist in his theatres, which almost nobody did.
1937 First Nuffield Professor of Surgery Oxford, United Kingdom Lord Nuffield's endowment created the chair and Cairns took it, leaving a thriving London practice for wards that did not yet exist. He brought his case records, his photographs and his artist with him.
1938 Planning for the war's head injuries Oxford, United Kingdom With war looking likely, Cairns drew up how Britain should handle brain and spinal wounds — specialist units, trained staff, casualties moved to the surgeon rather than the reverse. Almost all of it was adopted.
1940 – 1945 Mobile neurosurgical units North Africa and Europe Cairns designed and trained surgical teams that worked within miles of the fighting, so that head wounds were operated on in hours rather than days. British army death rates from such injuries fell below those of any other army.
1940 – 1945 The Nutcrackers Suite Oxford, United Kingdom St Hugh's College was requisitioned and became the Military Hospital for Head Injuries, the most important neurological unit in the country. Its records are still held in the college archive.
1941 Head Injuries in Motor-cyclists Oxford, United Kingdom Cairns published in the British Medical Journal on despatch riders killed in the first 21 months of the war — 2,279 of them, most by head injuries that a hard helmet would have prevented. He had been collecting cases since Lawrence died under his care in 1935.
1941 Head Injuries in Motor-cyclists Oxford, United Kingdom Cairns published in the British Medical Journal on the deaths of despatch riders, showing that most had died of head injuries that a hard helmet would have prevented. He had been collecting the cases since 1935, when Lawrence died under his care.
1941 The army orders helmets United Kingdom Within weeks of the paper, crash helmets became compulsory for every British Army motorcyclist. Cairns immediately began measuring what difference it made.
1941 The army orders helmets United Kingdom Within weeks of the paper, crash helmets became compulsory for all British Army motorcyclists. Cairns later showed that despatch rider deaths fell sharply once they were worn.
1943 Penicillin goes to war North Africa Working with Howard Florey, Cairns ran field trials of penicillin on wounded men in North Africa. It worked, and the case for mass production in time for the invasion of Europe was made on that evidence.
1943 The proof: deaths down by three quarters Oxford, United Kingdom A second BMJ paper, with the physicist A. H. S. Holbourn, showed army motorcycle deaths had fallen from around 200 a month to about 50. Cairns concluded that helmets for civilian riders would save a great many lives. It took Britain another thirty years to act on it.
1944 Normandy Normandy, France The neurosurgical units, the helmets and the penicillin all went ashore together, in the operation Cairns had spent six years preparing for.
1945 Patton Heidelberg, Germany Cairns was among the first surgeons called to General George Patton after a car crash left him paralysed from the neck down. Patton died of an embolism twelve days later.
1946 Knighted London, United Kingdom Appointed KBE for his war work. He returned to Oxford and to building the medical school he had been recruited to create.
1947 – 1952 The Oxford Clinical School Oxford, United Kingdom Oxford had taught pre-clinical medicine for centuries but trained no doctors. Cairns did much of the political work that turned it into a full medical school, against considerable opposition.
1952 Cairns dies of cancer Oxford, United Kingdom He was 56, and had been warned for years that his workload would kill him. He did not live to see helmets made compulsory for civilian riders, the change his own research had argued for.
1973 Helmets become compulsory in Britain United Kingdom Thirty-eight years after the crash, wearing a helmet became a legal requirement for every motorcyclist in the country. Most of the world followed.
1979 The Cairns Library Oxford, United Kingdom The medical library at the John Radcliffe Hospital carries his name, as does the Cairns memorial lecture.