Manchester

The recorded history of Manchester began with the civilian settlement associated with the Roman fort of Mamucium or Mancunium, which was established in about AD 79 on a sandstone bluff near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell. It was historically a part of Lancashire, although areas of Cheshire south of the River Mersey were incorporated in the 20th century. Throughout the Middle Ages Manchester remained a manorial township but began to expand “at an astonishing rate” around the turn of the 19th century. Manchester’s unplanned urbanisation was brought on by a boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution, and resulted in it becoming the world’s first industrialised city.

Manchester hosted the first post-war meeting of the TSS, in 1948, following a business meeting of members convened on 4 July 1947 during the annual meeting of the Association of Surgeons in Oxford. In Manchester operations were watched in the Royal Infirmary and the Christie Hospital, where papers were also presented. The Society returned in 1967 and amongst other talks was one given by John Charnley on his Sterile Operating Theatre.

Manchester was again visited in 1988 when Roger Marcuson hosted the meeting in The Hope Hospital, Salford (a town from which William Worrall Mayo emigrated as a “horse and buggy doctor” to America where his two sons William and Charles went on to found the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota). Papers with clear surgical messages were presented, and Miles Irving emphasised that some patients are too sick not to have an operation when threatened by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Haemorrhage, Fistula, Sepsis and Obstruction). Massive sepsis requires surgical drainage, the gut must have its blood supply protected, and spinal instability due to metastatic disease may warrant early fixation even in terminal patients.

 

Images above show Albert Square and Town Hall (Left) and the Corn Exchange (Right)