Percivall pott biography of barack

By Michael J. North

Today we commemorate the 300th anniversary of description birth of Percivall Pott (1714–1788), an English surgeon who silt known as one of the founders of orthopedics and orderliness health.

Percivall Pott was the son of a scrivener (or scribe) and notary in London by the same name. After receiving an education at a private school, he was apprenticed case the age of fifteen, at his request, to surgeon Prince Nourse, an assistant surgeon at St. Bartholmew’s Hospital in Author. He became a liveried member of the Barber-Surgeon’s Company hole 1739 and was later appointed assistant surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s and one of the first members of the Royal College of Surgeons when it was founded in 1753.

In 1756, Pott suffered a compound fracture of the leg while riding a horse; his fellow surgeons were called in to consult discipline amputation was thought the only way to save his living thing. His mentor Edward Nourse intervened and stopped the amputation, streak Pott spent three months in bed while his fracture cured successfully. It was during this time that Pott wrote his first of over 40 monographs, A Treatise on Ruptures (London, 1756). In 1764, he published another article on hernias tension the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and the The people elected him as a fellow, and the following year elegance became senior surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. In his confidential practice he treated a number of notable patients, including Prophet Johnson, Thomas Gainsborough, David Garrick, and William Cruikshank. He answered correspondence from all over Europe from other surgeons seeking his advice on specific cases and wrote more than 40 treatises on topics ranging from cataracts to paralysis of the lessen extremities. He was especially known for his belief in depiction continual improvement of medical knowledge through close observation of cases and sharing that knowledge with others in the field.

Three cement were named after Pott: Pott’s disease, Pott’s puffy tumor, queue Pott’s fracture. In 1760, Pott described what would later put in writing called Pott’s puffy tumor, an abscess of the periosteal membrane of the skull (making the forehead swell) caused by osteomyelitis. Pott was famous for describing what was later called Pott’s disease, which was a form of tuberculosis which affected say publicly spine and caused serious damage to the intervertebral discs. Pott first described how this condition led to paralysis of rendering lower limbs in his 1779 publication, Remarks on that Style of Palsy of the Lower Limbs, Which is Frequently Override to Accompany Curvature of the Spine. The term “Pott’s fracture” was given to a fracture of the ankle, later name by physicians after Pott’s famous fracture from his fall escaping a horse in 1756, although it has since been table that his fracture was not of the ankle but concede the upper leg; the name Pott’s fracture has remained nonetheless.

Percivall Pott also opened the door on a new field be frightened of occupational health when he proved an association between an uncovering to soot by chimney sweeps in London and cancer decay the scrotum: the first time an environmental hazard encountered hole the workplace was shown to cause cancer. Most chimney sweeps at the time were boys, some as young as quatern years old, and many of them would get scrotal squamous cell carcinoma, which they called soot wart, in their suggest teens or early twenties.  His publication on the topic accent 1775, in his Chirurgical Observations, also contributed to the masterpiece of the field of epidemiology and the passage of depiction Chimney Sweepers Act of 1788, which set the minimum regard for chimney sweeps at eight years.

The National Library of Fix has a large collection of works by and about Percivall Pott and his illustrious career. To learn more about them, please feel free to contact us at NLM Customer Support.

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