Sir Victor Horsley - Top Surgeons - Best Surgeons

Sir Victor Alexander Haden Horsley (April 14, 1857-July 16, 1916) was an accomplished scientist and professor. He was born in Kensington, London. He was educated at Cranbrook School, Kent and studied medicine at University College London and in Berlin, Germany (1881), and in the same year started his career as a house surgeon and registrar at the University College Hospital. From 1884 to 1890 Horsley was Professor-Superintendent of the Brown Institute. In 1886 he was appointed as Assistant Professor of Surgery at the National Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy, and as a Professor of Pathology (1887-1896) and Professor of Clinical Surgery (1899-1902) at University College London. He was a supporter for Women's Suffrage, and was an opponent of tobacco and alcohol.

Horsley specialized in surgery and in physiology. He was the first physician to remove a spinal tumor, in 1887, by means of a laminectomy. He developed many practical neurosurgical techniques, including the hemostatic bone wax, the skin flap, the ligation of the carotid artery to treat cerebral aneurysms, the transcranial approach to the pituitary gland and the intradural division of the trigeminal nerve root for the surgical treatment of trigeminal neuralgia.

As a neuroscientist, he carried out studies of the functions of the brain in animals and humans, particularly on the cerebral cortex. His studies on motor response to faradic electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex, internal capsule and spinal cord became classics of the field. These studies were later translated to his pioneering work in the neurosurgery for epilepsy. Horsley was also the first to use intraoperative electrical stimulation of the cortex for the localization of epileptic foci in humans, between 1884 and 1886, preceding Fedor Krause and Wilder Penfield.

He was also a pioneer in the study of the functions of the thyroid gland. He studied myxedema and cretinism, which are caused by a decreased level of the thyroid hormones (hypothyroidism), and established for the first time that they could be treated with extracts of the gland, in experiments with monkeys.

Appointed in 1886 as secretary to a governmental commission formed to study the anti-rabies vaccine developed by Louis Pasteur, Sir Victor Horsley corroborated his results and created a campaign to vaccine against rabies in the United Kingdom. As a pathologist, Sir Victor carried out research on bacteria and founded the Journal of Pathology.
onsummate skill, his life and work justify his epitaph as a "pioneer of neurological surgery."