Life in Her Hands: The Inspiring Story of a Pioneering Female Surgeon

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The 'audience' of shipworkers delighted in telling me that there were rats the size of dogs down in the grain. If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us Anaesthesia has improved in leaps and bounds during my time as a surgeon. When I started in 1960, anaesthesia was not nearly as sophisticated as it is now and there was no such thing as an intensive care unit. The anaesthetist keeps the patient alive while we surgeons carry out major and, sometimes, quite hazardous procedures. They have the knowledge and skills to maintain the integrity of a patient’s cardiovascular system during the course of the procedure. As surgeons we depend on the anaesthetist and it’s very much a partnership. I’ve worked with some wonderful anaesthetists and I’ve always been grateful for how they ensure patients are well looked after. Vascular surgery was fairly new when I trained in the sixties but when I watched an operation on an aortic aneurysm, I was captivated by it. I took every opportunity to develop in this area and by the time I became a consultant in 1972, I was a trained vascular and general surgeon. I did both for many years and started work at St Mary’s Hospital in the early 1980s. Women in surgery In 1991, Women in Surgical Training (Wist) was established by the RCS to encourage women into surgery and Mansfield was its founding chairwoman. "At that time we didn't have an organisation in this college that was dedicated to encouraging women, so we began it, to show that the career and the college are open to women. That message, 'You can do it, you are not going to meet antagonism,' might be the very thing women need to hear to encourage them to try it." In the past 10 years, the number of women consultant surgeons has almost doubled; the RCS hopes that by 2009, 20% of consultants will be women.

Life in Her Hands by Averil Mansfield | Waterstones

Just 2% of surgeons in the UK were women when Mansfield qualified in the early Seventies. By the Nineties, when 97% of surgeons were male, not much had changed. While sad to retire – it was a requirement of the NHS in 2002 when Averil reached 65 – she has certainly made the most of retirement. A lifelong pianist, she has since learnt to play the cello and is part of three amateur orchestras, through which she has built a busy social life.I would have liked children but I wasn’t able to with my first husband, so I just focused on the other things in my life,” says Mansfield. John William Paulton Bradley (husband), Russell Bradley (step son), Jason Bradley (step son), Lesley Forbes (step daughter)

Averil Mansfield - Wikipedia Averil Mansfield - Wikipedia

She was also honorary consultant in paediatric and vascular surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital and founded the first training programme for women at the Royal College of Surgeons. Her motto throughout her career was “lift as you climb”. a b "The NHS Heroes Awards". 21 May 2018. ITV. {{ cite episode}}: Missing or empty |series= ( help) a b c d e f g h Barrett, Anne (2017). Women at Imperial College: Past, Present and Future. World Scientific. pp.173–180. ISBN 978-1-78634-264-5. Mansfield’s reputation was such that Estée Lauder and John Mortimer, of Rumpole of the Bailey fame, were among her celebrity patients. She had the honour of being a guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2020, which led to her being asked to write her new autobiography, Life In Her Hands.Imaging has changed beyond all recognition since I first became a surgeon. I’ve lived through the advent of ultrasound, CT and MRI scanning – none of them existed when I qualified as a doctor. All of these things have made diagnosis more reliable and considerably easier and also help us plan for surgery. In one of my earliest aortic aneurysms, one of the patient’s kidneys was down in their pelvis which meant that the blood supply to the kidney was going to be cut off when I did the operation. It was perfectly feasible to proceed, and I successfully completed the operation, but today surgeons know things like that ahead of time and can make arrangements to ensure the procedure goes smoothly. One outcome is the setting up of a working group, Parents in Surgery, to come up with ways to support surgeons with children, given the anti-social hours many are expected to work, as well as frequently being on call. It's jolly hard work, let's be honest about it. The commitment is quite a major one. But it's the commitment that makes it enjoyable. If I operate on a patient and it's scheduled to last an hour and it lasts for four, there's nothing I can do about that. I have to see it through to the end. To me the professional satisfaction has been caring for somebody, as far as is humanly possible, right through their illness." Averil Mansfield was an ambitious and talented young doctor when she announced, to a senior surgeon, her plan to marry her architect boyfriend. Over the past 30 years, Mansfield has somehow found time with her husband, also a surgeon, to restore a 300-year-old stone-built house in the Lake District, "very very gradually. It's been a lovely thing - just to turn away from complex medical problems to this. It's finished now." And she plays the piano and cello. To unwind? Another no. "I'm not a very stressed person. I don't have too much unwinding to do."

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Born in 1937, Averil studied at Liverpool University’s School of Medicine and graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine in 1960. Averil began her career at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital before becoming a lecturer in surgery at the University. She later become consultant vascular surgeon at St Mary’s hospital in London. After qualifying as a doctor in 1960, Averil trained as a general surgeon, and became a consultant in Liverpool in 1972, at a time when just 2% of surgeons were women. Pioneering surgeon blazed a trail for women in medicine, becoming the UK’s first female professor of surgery.And now she has retired. Will she miss it all dreadfully? Guess the answer. "No." But I suspect she will be missed.