Harold Stiles

Sir Harold Jalland Stiles (1863 to 1946) was an English surgeon who built his career in Edinburgh. Born in Spalding, Lincolnshire, into a family of doctors, he graduated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1885, taught anatomy there and spent six months under Theodor Kocher in Bern, where he learned the aseptic system of surgery rather than Listerian antisepsis. He is recorded as the first surgeon to use the aseptic approach in Edinburgh. As surgeon to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, succeeding Joseph Bell, he and his assistants published papers on surgical tuberculosis, showing that tuberculosis of bones, joints and neck glands was often caused by the bovine tubercle bacillus. He also won recognition for research on the anatomy of the breast and the pathology of breast cancer. On 3 February 1910 he performed a pyloromyotomy for congenital pyloric stenosis, although the operation carries the name of Wilhelm Ramstedt, who performed it in 1911. In the First World War he directed military orthopaedics for Scotland and became known for treating nerve injuries at Bangour hospital. He was knighted in 1918, held the Regius chair of clinical surgery at Edinburgh from 1919 and presided over the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh from 1923 to 1925.