ABRAHAM COLLES: A TRIBUTE*

It was a characteristic and a graceful gesture on the part of the president to request that this session of the British Orthopaedic Association should open with a short tribute to the memory of a Dublin surgeon who in his lifetime was the unquestioned leader of his profession, and who after death has enjoyed for more than a century an eponymous immortality. That tribute, in my humble view, should most fittingly have been paid in this assembly by my old schoolfellow and colleague, Arthur Chance, who has worn the mantle of Abraham Colles for so many years as Professor of Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and as surgeon to the hospital in which Colles spent a lifetime of service to the sick poor of Dublin who for more than two centuries have there been the beneficiaries of Dr Steevens’s charitable bequest. Colles, a man of exceptional modesty, would, I think, have been surprised to know how many after his death would seek to write his biography. Off-hand, one can think of Robert McDonnell, of D’Arcy Power, of Percy Kirkpatrick-the revered and beloved doyen of our profession in Dublin to-day-and of Arthur Rocyn Jones, whom we have long since forgiven for his innocent slip in ante-dating the birth of our younger sister College in Lincoln’s In