James Hogarth Pringle

James Hogarth Pringle (born 26 January 1863 in Parramatta, Australia – died 24 April 1941 in Killearn, Scotland) was an Australian-born British surgeon in Glasgow, who made a number of important contributions to surgical practice.

[3] This visit to European centres was to prove important because he maintained links particularly with German, Austrian and Swiss surgeons, keeping up to date with their literature.

His colleague John Macintyre (1857–1928) had established the world's first x-ray service for patients in Glasgow Royal Infirmary in March 1896.

[6] He was a pioneer of treating fractures by fixation and had impressive results with an amputation rate for sepsis of only 2.6%, a dramatic reduction on the norm for the time.

These casebooks, neatly written and with meticulous coloured illustrations, offer an insight into the mind of a surgeon who was both painstaking and methodical.

He did this using a saphenous vein graft to restore continuity after excision of a syphilitic aneurysm of the popliteal artery and characteristically in this paper he duly acknowledged the "splendid work of Carrel".

Alexis Carrel had been the first surgeon to make an arterial anastomosis, work which led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912.

"An assistant," he wrote, "held the portal vein and the hepatic artery between a finger and thumb and completely arrested all bleeding.”[20] Pringle served in the First World War as a major in the RAMC at number 4 General Hospital at Stobhill, Glasgow.

He retired from surgical practice in 1923 at the age of 60 and was elected Visitor (Vice-President) of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow in that year.