When I was awarded a virtual cache, I was naturally very excited. I wanted to highlight something that could be unknown to cachers not local to whatever area I chose, and I wanted it, in some way, to be personal to me. And preferably a distance from other virtuals, but I was sadly uninspired by the space that runs across the middle of West Sussex in that respect. Ultimately I decided on the Sir Archibald McIndoe Memorial because it represents a tale worthy of rembrance, and also I love actual guinea pigs (so the metaphor had appeal), one of my grandfathers was a Flight Sergeant in the RAF (though happily did not suffer significant injury during WWII), the other spent the war as a fire fighter in London, and during my nursing career I have not only worked in research but the concept of taking care of patients not just physically but emotionally has been central to my career choices. The only thing that could have made it better was a cat. So I added Dottie...
Welcome to the Sir Archibald McIndoe Memorial
Archibald Hector McIndoe was born in Dunedin, New Zealand on 4th May, 1900, the second of four children. He won a scholarship at the University of Otago to study medicine and after graduation became a house surgeon at Waikato Hospital but he was already having thoughts as to how he could get to England in order to receive further training that would enable him to become a better surgeon.
However, he first received an opportunity to move to the US and he took a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, afterwards becoming an assistant surgeon and developed new techniques for dealing with cancers on the liver. During a demonstration in Chicago, he was asked to carry out abdominal surgery on a Mr Mancini under terms of complete discretion and for a hugely inflated fee. As Mr Mancini was whisked away from the hospital following his surgery, it turned out that he was the younger brother of Al Capone.
Lord Moynihan, then President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, was also present in Chicago and persuaded McIndoe to move to England with the promise of a job. Having moved his family across the Atlantic, McIndoe was to discover no job existed. Nevertheless, he started work on his RCS fellowship and found a new mentor in a distant cousin in London, Sir Harold Gillies, a highly regarded plastic surgeon who had transformed the practices of surgery during the First World War.
Gillies secured work for McIndoe at St Barts Hospital and provided opportunities for him to learn about plastic surgery. McIndoe assisted Gillies from 1932 to 1939 refining his surgical skills and building a reputation and his own practice. His personal plans were set aside as the situation in Europe worsened.
When the Second World War broke out, McIndoe was one of only four fully experienced plastic surgeons in Britain, the others being Gillies, Rainsford Mowlem and TP Kilner. The government requested they divide and head up four separate plastic surgery units to treat the expected influx of injured servicemen. Sir Archibald moved to the recently rebuilt Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, and founded a centre for plastic and jaw surgery, dealing with Royal Air Force (RAF) casualties.
As airborne warfare began the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead was to treat casualties at an unparalleled volume and severity of injury. Between 1939 and 1945, over four and a half thousand allied airmen had burn injuries from the war and of those injuries, 80% were what became known as ‘airmen’s burns’. These were deep tissue burns to the hands and face - loss of the nose, lips and eyelids was common, as too was the curling in of the fingers into claws or fists. These injuries were most prevalent during the Battle of Britain in 1940 when the hot, sweaty conditions in the cockpits lead to pilots avoiding the use of gloves or goggles. When an aircraft crashed or was shot down and the cockpit became engulfed in flames, the results were catastrophic. This was exacerbated by the introduction of new aircraft and more powerful fuel, which led to new and horrific injuries. It has been estimated that during some of these flash fires, sometimes caused by incendiary bullets hitting fuel tanks, temperatures could reach a sudden 3000 degrees centigrade inside the aircraft, causing unimaginable damage to exposed skin.
Before around 1936, anyone suffering a catastrophic burn injury would have simply died, as there was no knowledge of how to deal with such injuries. McIndoe realised that the airmen who were burned but crashed into the sea, tended to heal better than those that had crashed on land. With this in mind, he began giving patients saline baths, with excellent results. He used techniques never before tried, and when asked in 1938 how he had known how to help a patient with burnt away eyelids, when there was nothing on such injuries in the text books, he replied, “I looked down at the burned boy and god came down my right arm.”
It was clear to McIndoe that burns treatment techniques of the time were inadequate, and he responded by devising new ways to treat burns. He also evolved previous plastic surgery techniques to become far more effective in restoring wounded skin and tissue. His vision for treatment was far reaching and not limited to technical innovation. He also developed strategies for rehabilitation and reintegration of burns survivors back into society. In July 1941, over bottle of sherry with a group of airmen on one of the wards, he founded the Guinea Pig Club, whose members consisted of his recovering patients.
To become a Guinea Pig, members had to be aircrew and have undergone two surgeries performed by McIndoe. As McIndoe put it, “It has been described as the most exclusive Club in the world, but the entrance fee is something most men would not care to pay and the conditions of membership are arduous in the extreme”. The club began with 39 members, including McIndoe and other hospital staff, as a social and drinking club, but by the end of the war it had grown to 649 members, and had become a mainstay of the airmen’s recovery process. Many of the injured airmen would undergo several operations, and remain in recovery sometimes for years; the club acted as an informal kind of group therapy and support. .
Most of the club would be made up of British pilots or bomber crewmen. However, a number of Guinea Pigs were Canadian, Australian, New Zealanders, American and East European. As the numbers of casualties grew, McIndoe increased the numbers of people in his surgical team at East Grinstead. A key addition to the team in January 1942 was Canadian plastic surgeon, Dr Ross Tilley, who helped McIndoe with his pioneering techniques. In addition to the airmen, doctors and surgeons were made honorary members of the club, and local benefactors and supporters were known as ‘Friends of the Guinea Pig Club’. In 1957 a public house was opened in East Grinstead named The Guinea Pig. It has since been demolished, but the housing built in its place was named Guinea Pig Place.
Psychological support was also needed when the Guinea Pigs left the protection of the hospital ward and re-entered society to face the general public, whose responses were often not kind when seeing their disfigurements. Visits up to London were often accompanied by horrified onlookers and comments about not letting them out in public. McIndoe then put out a request that hospital staff and the welfare committee should spread the word that any injured airman in town must not be made to feel uncomfortable but be regarded as “normal young men who happen to be in temporary difficulty.” The people of East Grinstead thus became a key part of McIndoe’s vision and were fundamental in the rehabilitation process. For the warmth and acceptance that they showed to the Guinea Pigs, the people of East Grinstead were quite rightly given the accolade of ‘the town that didn’t stare’.
Many of the Guinea Pigs managed to reintegrate into society and find work through their determination and confidence, which was drawn from the other members. The Guinea Pigs continued to meet annually until 2007 to celebrate Sir Archibald McIndoe and the club. Against the odds many lived into old age, with six members still surviving in December 2021.
In 1946 McIndoe became a member of council for the RCS and in 1947 was awarded a knighthood to honour his work during the war. Around this time he visited East Africa and began farming in the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro. His time spent in the country led him to co-found the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) in 1957 to treat the rural population of this area. The Queen Victoria Hospital returned to its normal function as part of the new NHS in 1947.
Sir Archibald and his friends Neville and Elaine Blond were planning the foundations of a medical charity in the form of a new research institute at Queen Victoria Hospital to be launched in 1961. Sadly, at just 59 years old, Sir Archibald McIndoe died in his sleep on 11th April, 1960, one year before the opening of the Blond McIndoe Research Foundation (BMRF). His ashes were buried in the Royal Air Force church of St Clement Danes. The BMRF continues to this day to work on medical techniques to improve wound healing and repair tissue injury caused by trauma, surgery or cancer.
To claim this virtual, please upload a photo of the statue with your hand or face (or both) in the picture, and send me the answer to the following question:
By what simple word is Archibald McIndoe described in the writing at the base?
You do not have to wait for a reply in order to log, but any logs that do not meet the criteria will be deleted.
Virtual Rewards 3.0 - 2022-2023
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between March 1, 2022 and March 1, 2023. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 3.0 on the Geocaching Blog.