Success as a surgeon.
Dr Alexander Kennear Morson, 1881
From a photograph by Morris Moss of Maitland
Published in The Bulletin, 27 August 1881
In the late 1860s and early 1870s local and Sydney newspapers provided reports and descriptions of some of the surgical operations carried out by Dr Alexander Morson who, at the time, had a practice in West Maitland and was one of the honorary medical officers at The Maitland Hospital.
The reports of Morson’s work in Maitland are reminders that this was a period when new surgical procedures were being developed and when qualified doctors were seen as those who had trained and practised in London, Edinburgh and Dublin.
In October 1867 Morson’s successful surgery to address a long-standing disease of a patient’s elbow joint brought praise as an operation:
… greatly introduced and improved upon by the celebrated Scotch surgeon, Professor Syme, of Edinburgh, to whom Dr Morson was an assistant, and we believe has only once before been performed in this colony by another surgeon.
In November 1871 Morson performed the relative new procedure of the removal of an ovarian tumour. It was done after a long period of treating the tumour in other ways and after an insistent request from the patient. The tumour was successfully removed but, despite an initial recovery, the patient died ‘from exhaustion’. The newspaper article provides a description of the procedure and, significantly, observes:
It is only of late years that operations for the removal of ovarian tumours have come into vogue through the untiring exertions of celebrated English and Scottish surgeons.
The article goes on to note the publication of reports about the procedure in the medical journal The Lancet, including mortality rates.
The implications in these newspaper reports are that the surgical procedures were so new and intriguing that they warranted detailed descriptions and that Morson was keeping up to date with developments in the United Kingdom.
It is also significant that Morson himself had trained and worked in Edinburgh and had only recently, in 1867, arrived in the colony and in Maitland.