A surgical superstar
BMJ 2008; 336 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/sbmj.0804159 (Published 01 April 2008) Cite this as: BMJ 2008;336:0804159
- Peter Cross, editor1
- 1BMJ Careers
Harold Ellis doesn't seem like someone who's entered his ninth decade. But he has. Soon it will be 50 years since Clinical Anatomy, the standard anatomy textbook, first appeared. It's now in its 11th edition, and still going strong. Professor Ellis has slowed down a bit: now he says he works part time—Monday to Fridays—when once he also worked weekends and evenings.
Public lecture
I first chanced across Ellis some years ago at a public lecture at the Old Operating Theatre near Guy's Hospital, London. His talk was nigh on perfect: engaging, informative, brought alive with vivid word pictures and a peppering of anecdotes and amusing asides. When he isn't lecturing he is based in the Hodgkin's Building at Guy's. You get to his office on the top floor passing en route a collection of marble busts of medicine's good and great.
Given his passion for the history of surgery, it seems appropriate that his father was a barber. There wasn't a doctor in the family. He was good at biology at school; the two options were medicine or teaching and his old biology teacher advised against the latter. He studied medicine in Oxford, quickly settling for surgery as it seemed to him that medical patients died whereas a proportion of the surgery cases recovered. He flirted with the idea of going into obstetrics and gynaecology and now feels he made the right decision.
Oxford days
At Oxford he strove to work for surgeons with a reputation for teaching as well as being excellent clinicians, and it seems these qualities are inextricably linked. “I tried to get onto the firms with surgeons who did good ward rounds, checked our notes, and took us into theatre.”
National service was spent in the army. He enjoyed the surgery …
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