Post by Lawrence Okiror

When Lord Brock wore these boots operating at Guy’s in the 1960s, he had already stamped his name in surgery of the chest. “Surgery on the heart was explicitly ruled out by the medical teaching of the 1940s” — the opening line of Tom Treasure’s The Heart Club. Brock was among those who broke that rule. From 1936 as consultant at Guy’s, he hosted Alfred Blalock of Johns Hopkins there in 1947 to teach the blue-baby operation. His 1946 bronchial anatomy text still shapes how lung resection is planned. Harold Ellis, who died on 25 March aged 100, taught clinical anatomy in the Gordon Museum at Guy’s from 1993 into his nineties. His Clinical Anatomy — first published 1960, now in its fourteenth edition — taught the surgeons who taught us. Tom Treasure returned to Guy’s in 2001 as Professor of (non-cardiac) Thoracic Surgery. His work on pulmonary metastasectomy reshaped what counts as evidence for operating on lung secondaries. Guy’s recently marked 300 years. In its third century, those three put thoracic surgery on the foundation it stands on now. In the 2024-25 SCTS returns, our unit performed 969 primary lung cancer operations (by far the largest number in the UK) at 99.59% operative survival — work unimaginable without the operating, the anatomy, and the evidence they left us. The boots themselves were rescued from the Guy’s theatres by Jules Dussek — Brock’s student — and Tom Treasure then kept in successive thoracic surgeons’ offices. #ThoracicSurgery #LungCancer #SurgicalHistory #GuysHospital