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Unaccustomed as we are in
Ruyton XI Towns to having among us men or women of world renown, apart from Arthur
Conan Doyle, yet who knows of William Blair Bell?
The renowned Gynaecologist,
William Blair-Bell, is listed as living in Eardiston House in the 1929 and 1934
Trade Directories. His wife Florence
died in 1929 and is buried in Haughton churchyard. Blair-Bell himself collapsed on the train
returning from London on 25th January 1936. He was taken to Royal Shrewsbury Infirmary
where he was confirmed dead. He also is
buried in the churchyard at St. Chads, Haughton, near West Felton.
One has to wonder what
brought him to this neck of the woods, could he possibly have encountered
Robert Jones who worked in Liverpool hospitals, a major figure in the
establishment of orthopaedic surgery as a modern speciality and who worked with
Agnes Hunt in Baschurch and then Gobowen.
A review of `William Blair-Bell – father and founder`
by Sir John Peel in 1986 tells of a man for whom we mothers should be eternally
grateful.
“It
has been said that Blair-Bell (1871-1936) was the greatest gynaecologist of
this century: that he laid the foundations of modern gynaecology, raising it
from a branch of general surgery to a separate and important new
discipline. His admirers stress his
flair for research, his skill as a teacher as well as a surgeon, and his
administrative ability. Most of all,
they remind us that he was mainly responsible for the foundation of the College
of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1929.
None who knew Blair-Bell denied that he could be difficult, but many
said his achievements outweighed his failings. To Lord Dawson “He was a loveable torchbearer
who never forgot – or allowed anyone else to forget – that the was bearing the
torch”.
Son
of a General Practitioner, he began his career in a GP practice in
Wallasey. He was appointed as Assistant
Consulting Gynaecologist to the Liverpool Infirmary in 1905 at the age of 34,
when he began a lifetime of quarrelling with anyone who dared to disagree with
him.
In
1921 he began his controversial work on the use of lead in the treatment of
uterine cancer. His biographer credits
him with the introduction of chemotherapy for cancer.
*Wikipedia on Blair-Bell
- He started to experiment with the use of Lead as a
treatment, assuming that as a abortifacient,
it could reduce or inhibit the growth of cancer. From 1921, he was using lead
in the treatment of Uterine
cancer[4],
and colloid lead
iodide for the treatment of Breast
cancer, but later large scale tests proved both painful and
dangerous.[
In
1926 there was an incident which typifies Blair-Bell`s character. A new maternity hospital had just been
completed, much of which had been designed by himself. When it was found that the ground floor was 7
or 8 steps up from the street level, he instantly said this was quite
unsuitable for pregnant women and he would never set foot in the hospital, and
he never did. But he did succeed in
raising money from a shipping family to build a new gynaecology suite in the
Liverpool Infirmary
With
the establishment of the College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists,
Blair-Bell was in his element, fighting the Royal Colleges of Physicians and
Surgeons, who not only opposed the formation of the separate college but also
their right to the establishment of separate examinations and qualifications.
Blair-Bell
became the first President of the new College which he regarded as his own, he
designed the coat of arms and the President`s Gown which he refused to pass
onto his successor and he was buried with, if not in it.
The
man`s home life was, to say the least, mysterious. He married his cousin Florence Bell in 1898. There were no children and for the next 30
years, until her death in 1929, she remained a shadowy figure. None of Blair-Bell`s colleagues ever met her,
even those who worked most closely with him. There were rumours that she
occupied a separate part of the house, that she suffered from mental illness. Certainly, in her final illness she was
nursed in a separate part of the house which had no connexion with the part
occupied by Blair-Bell. After her death,
as if in expiation, Blair-Bell endowed a lectureship in her name, named a house
for her which he presented to the College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists,
and arranged for her portrait to be hung in the house. The portrait was painted posthumously from an
old photograph.
It seems strange that he
lived such a short time in our corner of Shropshire yet chose that he and his
wife should be buried here rather than where he had achieved so very much in Liverpool.
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