Abraham Colles, who died 160 years ago, helped Ireland lead the worldin medicine, writes Mary Mulvihill
Explorers get to name the remote lands they discover. Pioneering medics, on the other hand, get to leave their names on more intimate and troublesome spaces.
And just as you will find the names of numerous Irish explorers in your atlas, so too will you find Irish surgeons and physicians in every medical dictionary: Houston valves, Corrigan's disease, Bennett's fracture, Jacob's membrane, Stokes-Adams syndrome, Graves' disease, Wilde's incision, Todd's paralysis . . .
Most of the terms date from the golden era of Irish medicine, in the first half of the 1800s, when the Meath Hospital in Dublin (now part of the Adelaide & Meath Hospital, in Tallaght) was a world-famous training and research centre.
Robert Graves and William Stokes led the Meath revolution with their radical ideas about patient treatment and care, such as assessing people's condition by taking their pulses.
The names of many Meath Hospital students and staff are immortalised in the conditions they described and the techniques they pioneered, none more so than Abraham Colles, an anatomist who left his mark on several parts of the body.
You will find this 19th-century Kilkenny surgeon in, among other places, the groin (Colles' ligament) and an anal membrane (Colles' fascia), but he is best-known for a distinctive fracture of the lower arm that he was the first to describe.
This peculiar fracture of the radius bone just above the wrist, which can happen when someone falls on their palm, is still called Colles' fracture.
Colles, who died 160 years ago this month, was born in 1773 into "a Protestant English family . . . of good means, long settled in Kilkenny". His passion for medicine was triggered when he was a boy, after he found an anatomy book in a field; it had been left by a flood that washed it from the local doctor's house.
Colles went on to study medicine in Dublin, Edinburgh and London and later worked in Dublin's Meath and Dr Steevens hospitals and as professor of surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. A dexterous operator, and prepared to experiment, he was the first in Europe to tie the innominate artery, at the aortic arch.
On occasion, however, he may have taken a risk too many, and at one post-mortem he reputedly admitted: "Gentlemen, it is no use mincing the matter: I caused the patient's death."
At Dr Steevens he specialised in treating the deformities caused by syphilis; controversially, he recommended lowering the dose of mercury then used to treat the infection, realising its poisoning was often worse than the disease.
His later years were plagued by bad health and breathlessness. Colles thought he had valvular heart disease, but Stokes diagnosed a dilated heart, and to decide the matter Colles arranged his own post-mortem. After he died, in November 1843, however, Stokes was proved right. The Kilkenny surgeon had indeed had a dilated heart, and there was no sign of valvular disease.
You can read more about Irish pioneers in Mary Mulvihill's award-winning Ingenious Ireland and in Davis Coakley's The Irish School Of Medicine