Old Oswestrian’s Robert Jones & Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital

28/07/2023

Oswestry Intensive Course in Basic Science and Examination Techniques in Orthopaedics March 1995. Where are they all now?

28/07/2023

Robert Jones & Agnes Hunt junior orthopaedic surgical staff deployment Jan to June 1995. The rotas were keenly awaited, now they define some history of a units evolution. Where is everybody now?

21/07/2023

Gwyn A Evans (1944-22) was a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon at Oswestry. Born in Denbigh 1944. At the age of three family moved to Bon-y-maen in Swansea. Keen on music and an accomplished pianist. At Bart’s he joined the London Welsh Youth Choir and continued to accompany services. When he qualified in 1967, the dean, Ellison Nash, chose Gwyn to be his surgical house officer. In 1969 he worked at Birmingham Accident Hospital. Returning to Barts to do surgical and anatomy demonstration jobs. He passed his FRCS and joined a surgical rotation in Cardiff, where he wrote a paper on an incentivising spirometer for postoperative pulmonary complications, for which he won the Moynihan medal at the age of 30. In 1974, he went to Oswestry, where he joined the orthopaedic rotation: to Hereford, Stoke-on-Trent for trauma, and then children’s orthopaedics under Rowland Hughes. He gained a fellowship at Newington Children’s Hospital in Connecticut. The new Australian professor at Oswestry, Brian T O’Connor, asked him to write a job description for an ideal paediatric orthopaedic surgeon and six months later he was appointed to the job. He worked at Wrexham Maelor in trauma and elective orthopaedics until 1999. He served on the councils of the British Orthopaedic Association and the European Paediatric Orthopaedic Society. He received the Sharrard medal for children’s services and the British Society for Children’s Orthopaedic Surgery named its travel fellowship in his honour. He retired in 2004. He was strongly supported by his wife, Mary (née Tudor), his three children and seven grandchildren, and was strengthened by his deep faith which sustained him throughout his life. He died in July 2022. Plarr’s lives of fellows https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/lives/search/results?qu=%22RCS:E010152%22

07/07/2023

No idea how Threads will evolve but RJAH Old Oswestrian’s have our space. Follow, goto and post.

05/07/2023

Plarr’s Lives of Fellows, Royal College Surgeons of England collection biographies of deceased fellows, a unique record of the evolution of surgery from the foundation of the fellowship in 1843 to the present day. As a surgeon you can write a proforma before your death. https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/lives

05/07/2023

Prof Brian O'Connor 1929-99 established the Institute of Orthopaedics at at Oswestry. Born in Brisbane 1929, his father an engineer. His mother daughter of a ship owner. Educated St Joseph's College, Brisbane, where he was dux 1946, a champion gymnast. At the age of 15, he abandoned his studies to work on a merchant ship, but returned to graduate from the University of Queensland. He did junior jobs in Townsville and then went to Albany, New York, as an assistant resident in orthopaedics under C J Campbell, and the following year to the Karolinska under Sten Friberg. 1957, he went to Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore, to work with Sir Herbert Seddon, JIP James, KI Nissen & David Trevor. He supported himself by working as a professional acrobat. Senior house officer at Mount Vernon, learning the principles of plastic surgery. 1959 he took the MCh course at Liverpool and wrote a thesis on pes cavus for the degree. He became senior registrar to the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre and the Radcliffe Infirmary 1960, where he took a special interest in injuries involving the chest. 1962 he was seconded to the Sudan as senior lecturer in the University of Khartoum, in order to set up an orthopaedic and trauma service, and as civil war broke out he became adviser to the Sudanese Armed Forces, and established an artificial limb and appliance centre. During three months leave in Australia he took the MCh and FRACS examinations, and in 1965 returned to Oxford as first assistant to Robert Duthie, the Nuffield Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery, with honorary consultant status. In 1968 he was invited to be director of clinical studies at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Oswestry, where he set about establishing an Institute of Orthopaedics, and in 1978 he became the first Robert Jones Professor of Orthopaedics at Birmingham University. In 1992 he was able to open a new sophisticated theatre complex equipped with ultra-clean air. He retired in 1994 and, he was a collector of military antiques. From Plarr's lives of fellows RCSEng. https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/lives/search/results?qu=%22RCS:E008825

02/07/2023

Online tools such as ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/ and Orcid https://orcid.org/ can really help surgeons with knowledge transfer and raising the profile of their own & departments research.

29/06/2023

Prof Robert Roaf. 1913-2007 was a distinguished orthopaedic surgeon and one of the few remaining pre-war Himalayan climbers. In 1933 a chance encounter with the mountaineer and writer Marco Pallis was to have a lasting influence on Roaf’s life. Two years later Roaf was delegated to a conference in the Soviet Union and, just before his departure, Pallis invited him to join his next climbing expedition in Sikkim and Tibet. The Himalayan expedition, which included the explorer Freddie Spencer Chapman, was modest, but Roaf, as medical officer, had to learn Tibetan in order to cope with the patients he was invited to treat, many of whom suffered from disorders long since extinct in England. In 1946 he was appointed as an assistant surgeon at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary. The following year he moved to the Orthopaedic Hospital, Oswestry. There he developed new methods for treating scoliosis. In 1963 he became professor of orthopaedics in Liverpool. There he encouraged his students to do something adventurous and imaginative during their electives. He continued to make overseas trips, especially to the Himalayas, long after he retired. He published extensively, including Scoliosis (Edinburgh/London, E & S Livingstone, 1966), Spinal deformities (Tunbridge wells, Pitman Medical, 1977), Textbook of orthopaedic nursing (Oxford, Blackwell Scientific, 1971) and The paralysed patient (Oxford, Blackwell Scientific, 1977). Guardian obituary https://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/apr/19/guardianobituaries.obituaries

26/06/2023

John Rowland Hughes, 1915-98 was born and educated in Llangollen, and did his medical training in Liverpool, where he qualified at the beginning of the war. His first post was house surgeon to Watson-Jones at Liverpool Royal Infirmary. From 1941 to 1946, he was in the RAF Medical Service at Ely, and then the Weeton RAF orthopaedic centre at Fylde. After the war, he returned to Liverpool to specialise in orthopaedics, gaining the Edinburgh FRCS, MCh Orth and MD degrees. He was appointed consultant surgeon to the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital, Oswestry, in 1950, which began the transformation of Oswestry from a country hospital into a regional teaching centre of excellence. He inherited after-care clinics in North and mid-Wales, extending from Colwyn Bay to Aberystwyth, which were held in unlikely venues such as church halls, chapels, masonic halls and the Corwen Welsh-speaking Union Club. Rowland played a seminal part in this, instituting the Friday clinical conference to replace the long ward round as the main teaching forum. The 'Welsh firm' was the first to hold this conference regularly on a Friday afternoon, and gradually the custom of dining in the mess on a Friday evening, followed by entertainments such as Oswestry billiards, became a tradition. He was a member of many national and international societies and a popular visiting professor all over the world. Rather a slow operator, his favourite aphorism was "my patients may lose time but not blood". Indeed, he had no sense of time, and his clinics extended late into the evening, to the affectionate exasperation of his long-suffering staff. From Plarr’s lives of fellows https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/lives/search/results?qu=%22RCS:E008697%22&rt=false|||

23/06/2023

GK Rose (1916 - 1999) Gordon Rose was an orthopaedic surgeon who pioneered the development of walking orthoses (surgical appliances). He was born in Coventry on 28 April 1916, and qualified in medicine at Birmingham in 1940 with the gold medal in surgery. He then joined the RAMC, serving throughout the war in the Middle East, where he came into contact with John Charnley, the pioneer of hip replacement surgery. After the war he did junior surgical jobs in Birmingham, before being appointed as the sole orthopaedic surgeon to Shrewsbury Hospital and to the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Oswestry in 1950. He spent a year at Rancho Los Amigos in California, studying the biomechanics of gait, which became his life-work. He applied gait recording to the treatment of club foot, and later developed an orthosis, the 'swivel walker', which enabled children with spina bifida to stand and walk. He pioneered and presided over the Orthotic Training Council. He was appointed OBE in 1981. He was much sought-after as a speaker, and was noted for his prodigious memory for jokes and anecdotes. He was deeply involved in the planning of the new Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, which was opened in 1977. From Plarrs lives of fellows https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/lives/search/results?qu=%22RCS:E008886%22&rt=falsell

22/06/2023

Michael Hubbard (1938 - 2017). Was a was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Glan Clwyd Hospital and the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital, Oswestry. A larger than life surgeon. As a trainee, Mike obtained a World Health Organization scholarship to train with Ronald Huckstep in Uganda. One memorable event he was to recount in later years was fixing the multiple fractures of a man brought in by the police after interrogation, only for the police to come back to hospital when the man was recovering so that they could take him back to prison and execute him. 'I'm damned if I'm going to let them undo all my good work,' Mike thought, so he refused to release him, insisting that the patient was part of a medical trial, which would require regular follow-ups for several years. The argument was heated, but eventually the man was returned to the police on an assurance that his sentence would be commuted. Obituary Plarr’s Lives of Fellows https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/lives/search/results?qu=%22RCS:E009399%22&rt=false

19/06/2023

The Old Oswestrians Club was established in 1952 and we are keeping up with the times. We also have an Instagram account. Follow at

28 Followers, 24 Following, 44 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Old Oswestrians Club - RJAH Orthopaedic Hospital ()