Douglas MacGilchrist Jackson (Feb 1916 – Sep 2002)

  • MB BChir Cambridge 1940
  • MRCS LRCP 1940
  • FRCS 1943
  • MD 1951.
  • Born in Shanghai, China
  • Consultant surgeon at Birmingham Accident Hospital and founder of the hospital’s burns unit
  • Prior to his appointment in Birmingham, he was a surgical registrar at Guy’s and then a fellow in surgery at Harvard. At Birmingham, he introduced a team approach to the management of burns, emphasised the importance of early treatment of burns and introduced the ‘pin-prick test’ for assessing burn depth.
  • 1948 moved to the Acci soon after it had become an NHS hospital.
  • The new hospital had a nascent burn treatment unit and Douglas accepted the challenge to nurture it, soon becoming its Director – a position he retained until his retirement in 1978
  • At the time of his appointment, the Medical Research Council had already decided to site their Industrial Injuries and Burns Research Unit in the hospital, with the result that Douglas and the Research Unit became closely interlinked with great profit to each.
  • He introduced a team approach to the management of burns
  • 1953 Jackson gave the Hunterian lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons on the treatment of burns
  • 1953 he had devised the “pin-prick” test to differentiate partial thickness skin loss from full thickness skin loss within a few hours of admission to his unit.
  • 1954 he introduced the use of “postage stamp grafts”, usually consisting of two-thirds homografts (often from parents or siblings) and one-third autografts. When such wounds could be kept relatively free of pathological micro-organisms wound healing from the autografts was satisfactory. However, only patients with deep injuries covering less than about 10% of the body surface had a satisfactory outcome.
  • The challenge of trying to treat more extensive deep burns by early tissue excision to the full depth of the burn followed by grafting with the mixture of auto- and homografts occupied the next 5 years. It was a very worrying time for Douglas because bacteriological and clinical problems (most commonly extensive blood loss) often failed to produce the hoped-for benefits of survival and acceptable healing. This relative failure occurred in spite of assistance from members of the MRC Unit, particularly Dr. Edward Lowbury, the bacteriologist and Dr. Elizabeth Topley, the haematologist.
  • 1960s success gradually appeared with significant reductions in morbidity and mortality, the latter being analysed statistically by the MRC Unit Director, Dr. J.P. Bull. By 1969, this successful form of treatment was recognised by the American Burn Association, when Douglas received an invitation to give the Everett Evans Memorial Lecture.
  • Douglas was immediately impressed with the possibilities of the technique of early tangential excision and grafting of the burn. In 1972 along with Dr. Philip Stone, he produced a report of 50 consecutive patients treated in Birmingham with very satisfactory results. This success has been confirmed repeatedly and is now the method of choice world-wide.
  • 1969 Jackson presented the Everett Idris Evans memorial lecture
  • Member of the Birmingham Regional Hospital Board
  • Between 1973 and his retirement 5 years later, Douglas produced important reports concerned with thermal injury affecting bones, joints and eyes.
  • 1980 he held a Commonwealth Foundation lectureship in India and Sri Lanka
  • He was an honorary member of the International Society for Burn Injuries.
  • Elected the UK National Representative of the International Society for Burn Injuries at the inaugural meeting. Within 3 years, Douglas had persuaded Jim Laing (Director of the Wessex Regional Burn Centre in Salisbury) that there should be a UK section of the ISBI.
  • At a meeting in Salisbury in 1968, the British Burn Association (BBA) was born to fulfil this desire. Jim Laing was elected Secretary and Treasurer with Andrew Wilkinson as Chairman. In 1975, Jim Laing retired from his BBA appointments to become the foundation editor of Burns on behalf of the ISBI. Douglas gave up his ISBI Representative status to become the Chairman of the BBA.
  • This appointment and the invitation from the BBA to give the A.B. Wallace Memorial Lecture in 1979 and to receive the Whitaker Prize in 1992, recognising the great merit of his 30 years of effective burn treatment were fitting ends to a remarkably productive career spanning a period which started when extensively burned patients of all ages were given “comfort care” in a side ward and ended when aggressive treatment (often introduced by) and always implemented by Douglas Jackson ensured that most burned children and young adults survived and only the elderly succumbed.
  • Chairman and president of the Christian Medical Fellowship, and a prominent and popular speaker and writer in the early years of the organisation.
  • 1941 married Mabel Brand. They had two sons, one of whom predeceased him. The other followed him into medicine.