Geoffrey Jefferson, 1886-1961

Abstract

Geoffrey Jefferson was born in County Durham on 10 April 1886, the son of Dr A. J. Jefferson, a well-known surgeon and general practitioner in Rochdale, Lancashire. His great-grandfather had served in the Royal Navy, being entered as midshipman to Captain Bligh, later of Bounty. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School, and thereafter in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Manchester. He graduated M.B., B.S. (London) in 1909, proceeding to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1911 and to the M.S.(London) with gold medal in 1913. For a time he was demonstrator of anatomy to Professor Elliott Smith. While in the last-named post, Jefferson made some contributions to the study of the cerebral sulci, and it was this introduction to the nervous system that stimulated his lifelong interest in this system, as anatomist, physiologist and surgeon. In 1914, Jefferson, having married a former fellow-student, Dr Gertrude Flumerfelt, herself to become a psychiatric physician of parts, decided to move to Vancouver, British Columbia, his wife’s childhood home, in the hope of opportunities of a surgical career. The pathway to opportunity, then, and still largely today, for an able and ambitious young physician or surgeon was appointment to the staff of an undergraduate teaching hospital. Denied it by lack of vacancies at the relevant time, young medical graduates, now as then, migrate across the Atlantic and promising men are lost to us. But the first world war broke out shortly after the Jeffersons’ departure, and they speedily returned, Jefferson to join the staff of the Anglo-Russian Hospital organized by Sir Herbert Waterhouse. After some service in Russia, Jefferson went to France and with the 14th General Hospital began, under the hard conditions of the war, to gain his immense experience of the results of injury and infection of the brain, and of the narrow limits within which they could then be treated, at a time when the sulphonamides, the antibiotics and blood transfusions could not be called in aid and bacterial infection dominated the surgical scene.