Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 2173

CHARLES ALFRED BALLANCE (1856-1936) The healing of nerves. Macmillan and Co.; New York: Macmillan Company 1901 x [2] 112 pp., 16 col. plates, 1 illus. 27.6 cm.

A noted English surgeon, Ballance was the youngest of four brothers who were all physicians. He received his medical education at University College, London, served with the British Expeditionary Force during World War I, and returned to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital where he was consulting surgeon for many years. Ballance was one of the first neurosurgeons to perform a radical mastoidectomy with ligation of the jugular vein and one of the earliest to graft the facial nerve. His coauthor, Purves-Stewart was born in Edinburgh, where he studied medicine, and began his career as a neurologist. He later became assistant physician to the Westminster Hospital, where he initially lectured on pharmacology and therapeutics and later on diseases of the nervous system. His Diagnosis of nervous diseases (London, 1906) was very successful and became a standard text on the subject. Ballance and Purves-Stewart commented in the Preface that "The exact process whereby peripheral nerves, after they have been divided, become reunited, has been a subject of considerable controversy." The authors undertook the investigations presented in this book in order to resolve some of these problems and carefully explored the matter of degeneration and regeneration of peripheral nerves after they have been divided.