Page 36 - HKU Surgery 110 Anniversary E-Book

Chapter I: The Cradle of Our Origins

Other Surgical Leaders up to 1912
Four other British surgeons made important contributions to the development
of modern surgery in Hong Kong:

Dr Gregory P Jordan, MB, CM, MRCS(Eng), LLD, who was trained at A Seminal Discovery
the University of Edinburgh, headed the surgical unit at Alice Memorial
from 1888 to 1889 and worked alongside Cantlie to establish the surgical
curriculum. Subsequently, Jordan was colonial surgeon and Port Health Training and the promotion of Western
Officer before setting up private practice. He was made HKU’s first Pro- medicine may have been at the heart of
Vice-Chancellor in 1913, Professor of Tropical Medicine in 1915 and Acting the College’s work, but its leaders were
Vice-Chancellor in 1918-21, when he was relocated to London. also interested in research. Cantlie,
in particular, made an important
Dr John Thomson, MBBS, MD, was also a graduate of the University contribution to research that would be
of Edinburgh and the first missionary doctor appointed by the London a reference for the highly successful liver
Missionary Society to Hong Kong, arriving in 1889. He became first Medical transplant team of a century later: the
Superintendent of Alice Memorial and the College’s Secretary and Director novel concept of hepatic lobulation based
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of Studies, and he was head of surgery from 1896 to 1897. Thomson was not on vascular supply . He developed this
without controversy – tensions ignited because he saw Alice Memorial as a theory after conducting an autopsy on
mission hospital, while the doctors who had been running it considered it a man who died in prison and whose
to be a lay hospital. Nonetheless, he went on to lead the hospital and was right liver was atrophic. This inspired his
appointed Secretary of the College in 1891, a post he held for many years. proposal that the liver was functionally
separated into right and left halves. The

Dr Alexander Rennie, MBChB, DPH, graduated from the University of Aberdeen division between the two became known
(like Manson and Cantlie). He came to Hong Kong in 1886, where he as Cantlie’s line – knowledge that would
remained for 30 years, becoming Lecturer in Surgery, Lecturer in Materia come to allow for safe hepatic resection
Medica at the College, and surgeon at Nethersole Hospital, which also with less blood loss.
became a teaching hospital for the College. Rennie was tasked in 1894 with
reporting on a pandemic in China – he identified it as bubonic plague. He “Any surgical interference with the liver will be much more readily tolerated as
returned to the UK in 1907. it approaches that line which I have termed the mid-line of the liver, and that
haemorrhage is less to be dreaded as the liver is incised or torn in the neigh-
Dr Wilfred Vincent Miller Koch, MBChB, MD, was a graduate of the University bourhood of that line.”
of Edinburgh who entered the Colonial Medical Services in 1903. Two years - Dr James Cantlie -
later, he became Lecturer in Surgery at the College where he remained for
years, witnessing the transferral of the College to the Faculty of Medicine at “Cantlie’s line was a very important anatomical discovery for liver surgery.
HKU in 1912, then continuing as Lecturer in Surgery in the University until Without this knowledge, we would be operating blindly.”
1917 when he entered private practice. In 1914, he became Superintendent - Professor Lo Chung-Mau, who applied that knowledge in helping to
of the Government Civil Hospital, where teaching also took place, and in develop the world’s first living donor right lobe liver transplant in 1996 -
1926, he was appointed to the Legislative Council. Koch served as a member
of the HKU Senate until 1931.

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