Origin of the British Society for Surgery of the Hand
In Britain, plastic and orthopaedic surgeons have always collaborated to manage both traumatic and non-traumatic hand and upper limb conditions, including those present at birth.
Hands injured by burn and blast were formed a major part of the work of plastic surgery units in Britain during the second world war. In the United States, Sterling Bunnell’s wartime work on hand injuries led to the founding of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand in 1946, and several British surgeons crossed the Atlantic and came home eager to develop the sub-specialty. BAPS shared this interest from the start, devoting a clinical meeting at the Birmingham Accident Hospital in June 1949 to reconstruction of the hand.
Discussions about formalising hand surgery into a group must have taken place early in 1952, because on 26th July that year Sir Reginald Watson-Jones a prominent orthopaedic surgeon who was then on the council of the Royal College of Surgeons of England sent a telegram to Derby hand surgeon Guy Pulvertaft advising caution (see figure 1)
Clearly Pulvertaft ignored the advice because on 7th November 1952, he was part of a small group who dined in London’s Athenaeum club at the invitation of plastic surgeon Patrick Clarkson. There they founded “The Hand Club” with the aim of encouraging the study of hand surgery. Those also present were a mixture of orthopaedic and plastic surgeons including Sir Archibald McIndoe, Gerry Moore, Rainsford Mowlem, Jimmy James, Ronnie Furlong and the anatomist James Whillis. Herbert “Jim” Seddon and the Presidents of BAPS and the British Orthopaedic Association were invited to join for their terms of office, and John Barron joined in 1953.
For the next twelve years the Club met at members’ hospitals for lunch and a clinical morning. Membership grew to twelve, balanced between orthopaedic and plastic surgeons, anatomists and specialists in physical medicine. Residents of the host hospital could attend the clinical sessions, but membership was by invitation only, which allowed members to criticise one another’s work openly.
That exclusivity frustrated many younger surgeons. On 13 January 1956 Donal Brooks, Dick Dawson, Adrian Flatt, Stewart Harrison, Douglas Reid, Robert Robins and Graham Stack met in the bar of the Royal Society of Medicine, dined for ten shillings and sixpence, and next morning attended a clinical meeting that Flatt had arranged at the London Hospital. By the end of the weekend they had decided to form a hand society. On 11 May 1956 Flatt, Harrison, Reid, Robins and Stack met in Derby and formed “The Second Hand Club”, soon numbering 19 members.
Its first secretary, Graham Stack served gathered the proceedings of these early meetings on cyclostyled sheets which he bound. Although initially intended only for himself, these became the prototype for the Club’s journal, first published in 1969 as “The Hand”, later becoming the Journal of Hand Surgery.
An expected rivalry between the two clubs never materialised. Sir Archibald McIndoe chaired a joint meeting at the Royal College of Surgeons on 22 November 1958, and on 8 October 1964 at Charing Cross Hospital the clubs merged as “The British Club for Surgery of the Hand”. On 30 November 1967 John Barron wrote to Stack urging him to put the specialty on a more formal footing as an “Association”. However this might have produced the acronym “BASH”, so on 15 November 1968, the Club changed its name and constitution becoming the British Society for Surgery of the Hand. Pulvertaft became its first President. John Barron later held the presidency too, becoming only one of a few to hold the presidency of both BAPS and BSSH.
The amalgamated informal clubs of the 1950s have since grown into a internationally significant society still composed of surgeons from the two stem specialties.
Adapted from chapter 18 in “BAPS the First Forty Years” by Charles Chapman available here.