page_title: Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, 1st Baronet
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, 1st Baronet / Life and career / Career
caption_attribution_description: Sir William Arbuthnot Lane.
context_page_description: Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, Bt, CB, FRCS, Legion of Honour, was a British surgeon and physician. He mastered orthopaedic, abdominal, and ear, nose and throat surgery, while designing new surgical instruments toward maximal asepsis. He thus introduced the "no-touch technique", and some of his designed instruments remain in use.
  Lane pioneered internal fixation of displaced fractures, procedures on cleft palate, and colon resection and colectomy to treat "Lane's disease"—now otherwise termed colonic inertia, which he identified in 1908—which surgeries were controversial but advanced abdominal surgery. During World War I, as an officer with the Royal Army Medical Corps, he organised and opened Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup, which pioneered reconstructive surgery. The late-Victorian and Edwardian periods' preeminent surgeon, Lane operated on socialites, politicians, and royalty. Lane thus attained baronetcy in 1913.
  In the early 1920s, as an early advocate of dietary prevention of cancer, Lane met medical opposition, resigned from British Medical Association, and founded the New Health Society, the first organisation practising social medicine.
context_section_description: In 1877, at age 21, he qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and began to practise in Chelsea, London, at the Victoria Hospital for Children. In 1883, Lane became a Fellow of Royal College of Surgeons and joined Great Ormond Street Hospital, where he was consultant until 1916. In 1888, at age 32, Lane returned to Guy's Hospital as anatomy demonstrator and assistant surgeon, and remained with Guy's for most of his career.
  Lane became especially known for internal fixation of displaced fractures, neonatal repair of cleft palate, and developing colectomy, which, although highly controversial and opposed by most surgical peers, notably advanced abdominal surgery. Lane collaborated with Down Brothers to design a number of surgical instruments, including screw driver, periosteal elevator, tissue forceps, intestinal anastomosis clamp, bone-holding forceps, and osteotome.  For his surgery on British royalty, he was awarded baronetcy in 1913.
  Lane became an officer in Royal Army Medical Corps, head of army surgery, during World War I (1914–18). For this work as consulting surgeon in Aldershot at the Cambridge Military Hospital  and for opening Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup—where, overcoming government resistance to fund it, he gave Harold Gillies a ward where Gillies pioneered reconstructive surgery—Lane was appointed Companion of The Most Honourable Order of the Bath. In 1920, rather soon after returning from wartime service, Lane retired from Guy's Hospital, yet continued private practice out his home office.
caption: Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, 1st Baronet
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