Who’s Who in Orthopedics tect’s drawings of the completed project were on
view and were very impressive. Behind the key figure of General Robert E. Lee, the sculptor had planned to carve a group of other Confederate generals, one of whom would undoubtedly have been Dr. Hoke’s famous father, Major General Robert F. Hoke. Dr. Hoke greatly admired the conception and was deeply moved at the thought of what the superb memorial would mean to the South.
As he and his northern friend were moving away, Hoke said to him, “I wish Borglum (the sculptor) would do one more thing. I wish he would place the figure of Abraham Lincoln on the summit of the mountain looking down on the whole group.” To Hoke “the war was over,”
and he had recognized the spirit of the Great Emancipator and wished the South as well as the North to pay him tribute.
This slender ascetic looking man with dark and piercing eyes, a friendly smile, and a delightfully keen sense of humor must have been a sturdy youth in his student days. In later life, pulmonary disease and his strenuous work slowly sapped his strength but never his bonhomie nor his endear- ing kindness.
In 1937, he retired from private practice and moved with his family to the lovely old town of Beaufort, South Carolina. They called their home
“Windy Marsh” and for a while Dr. Hoke’s health was better, and his passing came as a shock to his numberless friends.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes has given us his ideal of living. “Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum; to hammer out as compact and solid a piece of work as you can; to try to make it first rate and to leave it unadvertised.” Michael Hoke completely exemplified this ideal.
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Sir Frank Wild HOLDSWORTH
1904–1969
Frank Holdsworth was one of the great orthope- dic surgeons of his generation, but the achieve- ments for which he will be remembered extended far beyond that. He was a fine teacher, a great innovator, and in his later years an almost fanati- cal campaigner for a sound and rational system for training the surgeons of the future. In this campaign his prime consideration was to get a square deal for the young man in training, and he was not prepared to subjugate this either to the needs of the National Health Service or the con- venience of consultants. Few younger generations can have had such a redoubtable champion from the ranks of the older, and although for many years he was a voice crying in the wilderness—
the wilderness in those days being anywhere north of Luton—he came in the end to be the most authoritative single voice in the country, listened to with equal respect in the highest academic circles and in the corridors of power. At the time of his death he was within an ace of seeing all the reforms and ideas for which he had striven so hard and so long finally accepted and put into practice.
Frank Holdsworth was born and brought up in
Bradford and, apart from his years of training,
first at Cambridge, where he was an exhibitioner,
and then at St. George’s Hospital in London, he
spent the whole of his professional life in
Sheffield. So he was a true Yorkshireman, and
made no bones about it; which means that he was
uncomplicated, direct, transparently honest,
warm hearted, occasionally irascible, utterly reli- able, a bit stubborn (he used to say pig-headed), completely loyal and quite incapable of being spoiled either by power or success or anything else. Most people who scale the heights as he did are affected in some degree by it, but I doubt if he changed in the slightest during the 30-odd years that I knew him so well.
When he returned to Yorkshire, it was first of all as Resident Surgical Officer at the Royal Infir- mary, Sheffield, where he came under the influ- ence of Ernest Finch, another great surgeon for whom he conceived a lifelong respect and devo- tion. In those days there was no segregation of orthopedics and trauma, but within a few years and with the help and encouragement of Sir Ernest, he was elevated to the staff and given the job of creating an orthopedic and accident service. He developed it, as everyone knows, into one of the most famous units in Britain and a
“must” for every foreign orthopedic surgeon vis- iting this country. It was at the Royal Infirmary that he later introduced the rotating registrar system, an innovation that has since become popular all over Britain, and he was justly proud of the fact that in all the years of its operation only one registrar left the rotation without gaining the FRCS.
Working as he did in a highly industrialized area of steel and coalmining, he always had a par- ticular interest in accident surgery, and being the kind of surgeon who, to use his own words, liked to see the ball in the back of the net, he became one of an early pioneer group who developed the concept of rehabilitation in this country. This was under the auspices of the then Miners’ Welfare Commission, before the advent of the National Health Service. Later, under the same auspices, he was one of a small group to visit Canada and the United States to study the problems of paraplegia, then a scourge in the mining industry. Paraplegia remained one of his major interests throughout the rest of his career and he became an interna- tional authority on the subject. Characteristically, on returning from this trip, he campaigned until he succeeded in establishing the spinal injuries unit at Lodge Moor Hospital in Sheffield, not as a center for dealing with the terrible complica- tions of paraplegia but as an early transfer unit where these complications could be prevented.
With Alan Hardy and David Evans he built this up to its present international stature.
It was on this trip to the States that he first saw the staff conference in action, notably in Boston,
where once a week the entire staff presented their problem cases for discussion. The particular con- ference that we attended developed into an almost gladiatorial contest with such orthopedic giants as Smith-Petersen, Joe Barr, Bill Rogers and Eddie Cave taking part. Frank Holdsworth, who had visited many continental clinics where, in those days, contradicting the chief was tantamount to asking for the sack, was delighted and stimulated by the Bostonian atmosphere and promptly inau- gurated the Saturday morning clinical confer- ences in Sheffield, over which he presided regularly up to the time of his death. These con- ferences were open to all orthopedic surgeons and their junior staff in and around Sheffield, and the atmosphere was delightful. They were completely informal and friendly, there was no showing off, and cases were presented only because they were problems about which advice was needed. He always insisted on starting the discussion at reg- istrar level and working up in order to discourage any reluctance to disagree with the chief. His own intellectual honesty somehow washed off onto everybody who became regularly associated with him in this way, and although a little coat-trailing or kite-flying was occasionally permitted in order to liven up a discussion, the general rule was that, if you had nothing to say, you said nothing. He was a particularly severe debunker of loose think- ing or armchair theorizing. On one occasion when my own kite had got a little out of control he pref- aced his summing up by saying that he had never heard me talk quite so much out of my hat and then proceeded to take me apart and leave the pieces lying all over the floor. The juniors loved it, of course, but at the end of the conference he took me aside and asked if I would go along and see a patient with him because, as he said: “I think I’ve made a pig’s ear of it”—another favorite expression of his, which, translated into standard southern English, meant that it was not quite coming up to expectations. It was small incidents of this kind that revealed something of the char- acter of the man.
The same atmosphere prevailed in his unit. He had no time for sycophants or for any form of insincerity, and every member of his team was expected to say what he thought and call a spade a spade. He trained many fine surgeons, some of whom remained with him as consultants as the unit expanded, though they were always his
“boys” even when they became famous in their own right. The unit always remained a team, every member regarding him with great respect
146Who’s Who in Orthopedics
and affection. Indeed, this applied to everyone who worked with him, including the many foreign surgeons who came for a period of train- ing in his department.
He was essentially a modest man and although he had so strong a personality and such gifts of leadership, he had that sense of humility about his own achievements that is so characteristic of many great men. Indeed, he was always faintly surprised at finding himself famous and sought after, and although he knew for years that the writing was on the wall, he refused to make any concessions. To the despair of friends and medical advisers alike, he continued to drive himself as hard as ever in the many high offices to which he was called—President of the British Orthopedic Association, Senior Vice President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Examiner to the College and to many universities apart from his own, and a much sought after lecturer in many parts of the world. Even in his last year he visited the United States twice and on the last occasion was made an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons—an honor very rarely awarded to surgeons outside that country. His knighthood in 1967, followed by a professorship in 1969 in his own university, made a fitting climax to a brilliant career. Few people go so far without leaving in their wake some enemies and detractors but Frank Holdsworth left none.
Perhaps the secret lay in the fact that he was com- pletely devoid of guile or malice, that he never contrived a situation in his life, and that at the end of it all, as Professor Sir Frank Holdsworth, he was essentially the same warm, unaffected, approachable and very human person as the young man from Bradford who started the ortho- pedic department at Sheffield Royal Infirmary more than 30 years earlier.
Of his other interests, he liked traveling, fishing, history, Westerns, good cooking, good conversation and good companionship. As a founder member of The Journal of Bone and Joint
Surgery (he was on the original editorial board),he was also a founder member of the traveling club derived from it, and those of us who traveled with him will remember what a good companion he was. He could be equally stimulating and provocative whether defending the Plantagenets, whom he greatly admired, or extolling the beau- ties of his native Yorkshire and the inestimable advantages of living and working there, which he always insisted should remain a carefully guarded secret. “Don’t ever explode this myth about the
ugly uncivilised North,” he would say, “or they’ll all come up from the South and spoil it.”
He was very happy in his home and family life.
He left behind his wife Marjorie, herself a York- shire woman endowed with many of his own ster- ling qualities, his son John and his daughter Mary.
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