Geoffrey Jefferson

Sir Geoffrey Jefferson was a British neurologist and one of the pioneers of neurosurgery in Britain. Born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1886, the son of a surgeon, he was educated in Manchester, took his medical degree in 1909 and became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons two years later. During the First World War he served at the Anglo-Russian Hospital in Petrograd and with the Royal Army Medical Corps in France. Back in Manchester he performed the first successful embolectomy in England in 1925, became a neurosurgeon at the Manchester Royal Infirmary in 1934, and five years later became the first professor of neurosurgery in the United Kingdom, at the University of Manchester. The Jefferson fracture is named for him because he was the first to describe it. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1947 and received the Lister Medal in 1948. His Lister Oration of 1949 took the Manchester Mark 1, one of the earliest electronic computers, as its subject and so joined the early debate on artificial intelligence. He died in 1961.