The office of Coroner is a uniquely English institution. Scotland never had coroners. England exported her Coroner to almost everywhere coloured red in the Victorian atlas. The first mention of the Coroner dates from the reign of Alfred the Great. We have no records of that period. The Coroner, as we know him today, dates from September 1194, during the reign of Richard the Lionheart whose interest in England was as a source of money to help finance his obsession with warfare. Much of today’s English legal structure was born in the last decade of the 12th century. The edict that formally established the Coroners was Article 20 of the “Articles of Eyre” in September 1194. In 1195, Justices of the Peace were established. Ironically, they became the major reason for the decline of the Coroner in later centuries. Coroners originally had to be Knights and men of substance. They were unpaid. Their prime function was to service the Royal Courts of Law, the General Eyre, which circulated slowly around the kingdom. This took so long to return to each county that, unless careful records were kept by the coroners, many cases never came to trial and potential revenue was lost to the Crown. Other activities of the Coroner includes jurisdiction over “treasure troves”, shipwrecks and catches of royal fish: the whale and the sturgeon. Historically, his most important role, the only one to survive until today, was his role in the investigation of sudden death.
From the earliest classical cartographers, belief in the existence of a ‘Terra Australis’ was widespread. There had to be a great southern land to balance the geography of the world. Inexorable plate tectonics may have separated Australia and Antarctica 45 million years ago but it was only within the last few hundred years that Abel Tasman and James Cook isolated and defined them as separate lands for science, politics and strategy. In 1901, the Australian colonies had just federated and formed a nation, the Commonwealth of Australia. The International Geographical Congress had proclaimed 1901 as ‘Antarctica’ year. The heroic age of Antarctic exploration was underway. Antarctic medical practice is unique because there is no indigenous population. This review starts with the primitive medicine practiced by doctors on board with Captain James Cook in 1775. The heroic era of Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawson was followed by a highly mechanized transition period and ends with modern medicine used in permanent stations and research. In Antarctica, we have Earth’s remaining tenuous links with outer space (the last two great frontiers). NASA scientists have used Antarctica to test lunar survival strategies because ‘this is as close to lunar conditions as we could get here on Earth’.
This year marks the 100th anniversary since Emil Theodore Kocher (1841–1917) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the first surgeon to win this prize, for his “work on the physiology, pathology and surgery of the thyroid gland”. After graduating from the University of Berne in 1865, he worked with the doyens of European and U.K. medicine: Billroth, Langenbeck, Lister, Pasteur, Paget, Wells and Hutchinson. Kocher was Professor of Surgery at Berne for 45 years. During this period, the Inselspital changed from a modest local surgical clinic to an institution regarded around the world as a Mecca for surgical thought and technique. By the end of the 19th century, surgeons felt they needed to communicate with each other and discuss their results so as to improve the art of surgery. The first International Society of Surgery (founded in 1902) had its first Congress in Brussels in 1905 under its President, Professor Kocher, who was regarded as one of the safest and most skilled surgeons in the world. He contributed innovations to gastrointestinal surgery, hernia repair, orthopaedics, military surgery, genitourinary surgery, haemostasis and shock, the diagnosis of brain and spinal cord disease, anaesthesia and the design of surgical instruments. Kocher, the icon of Swiss surgery, profoundly influenced the establishment of the scientific basis of American surgery through his connection with William Halstead and, in particular, Harvey Cushing. He was a modest and deeply religious man who was unaffected by fame and power dedicating his life to humanity with humility.
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