Price, carried the sense of sight into the abdominal cavity" (William J. Mayo); " I n pelvic surgery Tait stood first and taught us the best we know. He has had no close second, his disciples have not greatly improved upon his ways " (Joseph Price).As a craftsman Tait was very quick and dextrous and had great resource and courage. His surgical equipment was of the simplest, and he preferred to operate in the patient's bedroom on a narrow trestle table or in a small institution such as the hospital which he founded in Birmingham, or at his own nursing home where much of his pioneer work was performed. His surgical technique was copied from Syme, who relied on neatness and cleanliness of the surgeon, his assistants, and the surroundings of the operation field. His instruments and silk ligatures were boiled, and plenty of soap and water were used on his hands and the patient's skin. He recognized the dangers which arose to the surgeon from contacts with sepsis in the wards, the theatre, or post-mortem room-hence his desire to insulate himself from the perils of the great hospitals and work in a smaller unit. Lister's work he neither understood nor appreciated. He had found a method that suited himself and that sufficed. His success was empirical and Lister's slow scientific advance into the problems of sepsis, with his advocacy of changing surgical technique to meet problems as they unfolded themselves, prejudiced him against the whole of the Listerian doctrine after paying lip service to it in its earliest years. Hereafter, he lost no opportunity in voicing his prejudice and thus placed himself in antagonism with forces which more and more swept by him. He had, however, by chance taken a short cut which led to ' aseptic surgery ', into which the extreme ' antisepticism ' of Lister's early days gradually merged.
R A B B I T S ' S K U L L S 83His was a dominant personality, " the power of the man held you like a vice " says one contemporary, but his strong prejudices, domineering manner, and his hard hitting in the controversial matters in which he so frequently indulged in the medical press and at professional meetings left him few friends outside the small group with which he was in immediate contact in his work. He took a challenge from the provinces to London which the leaders there resented most bitterly, not so much perhaps from what he said as in the way he said it. His bitterest opponents were Spencer Wells (once his friend and leader), Mathews Duncan, and a number of the younger school of surgeons who had accepted and appreciated the work of Lister. These qualities, however, must be integrated into the times in which he lived -something explosive was required to remove old prejudices towards the surgery of the abdomen, and his methods of controversy were only slightly more heavy handed than those which were then commonplace in medical circles. The fact remains, however, that these personalities rather overclouded his great achievements, a position which has remained to this day, not only in the city in which...
