Lawson TaitDied 13 Jun 1899 at age 54 (born 1 May 1845).British surgeon who was the first to both diagnose and remove a diseased appendix (1880). He drained an abscess associated with the perforated appendix, a procedure which was not novel, as several surgeons had done the same previously. Tait was the first to actually remove the appendix as part of the planned treatment. (Nearly 150 years earlier, Claudius Amyand described a surgery in 1736 for a hernia in an 11-year-old boy during which his perforated appendix was found within the hernia sac. This first recorded removal of the appendix was not the subject of the operation but was only secondary to the hernia repair.) By 1889, work published by Charles McBurney established treating appendicitis early to avert a tragic outcome of delay. |