Hugh Cairns (surgeon)

Sir Hugh William Bell Cairns was an Australian neurosurgeon, born at Port Pirie, South Australia, in 1896 and dead at Oxford in 1952, who lived in England for most of his life. A Rhodes Scholar from the University of Adelaide, he read medicine at Oxford, worked as a neurosurgeon at the London Hospital and with Harvey Cushing at Harvard, and then set up the Nuffield Department of Surgery at Oxford as its first professor. He was a key figure in the growth of neurosurgery as a speciality and in the treatment of head injuries in the Second World War. After treating T. E. Lawrence following his motorcycle crash, he studied head injuries among despatch riders, and his research led to the use of crash helmets by military and civilian motorcyclists. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1946.