Andrew Russell Murray
Andrew Russell Murray FRCSEd was an Australian orthopaedic surgeon who pioneered developments in hand surgery while working at Leith Hospital, Scotland. These included pollicisation, the use of stainless steel joint prostheses to replace finger joints and the use of wire to stabilise finger fractures and bone grafts. He later worked as an orthopaedic surgeon in Brisbane, Australia. On 1 December 1955 he was shot dead by Karl Kast in the "Brisbane medical massacre".
Early life and education
Murray was born in Lyell, Tasmania, Australia, in 1910, the son of Russell Mervyn Murray, a mining engineer, and his wife Vivienne Murray. He went to school at Scotch College, Melbourne, and then studied medicine at Ormond College in the University of Melbourne. Two accidents in childhood had resulted in disabilities. His left leg had been amputated after a shooting accident. In a separate accident he sustained a permanent nerve injury of the left ulnar nerve resulting in impaired function of the hand. Despite these setbacks he became an "accomplished cricketer and ballroom dancer" at university. He graduated MB BS in 1936. During residency posts at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne he decided to become a surgeon.Career in Scotland
Murray took a temporary post as assistant surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and in 1941 he was appointed associate assistant surgeon at Leith Hospital, where he became surgeon in charge of a hand clinic. He qualified as fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1943. In 1946 Murray published techniques in hand surgery which, according to Hooper, had not been previously described. These included pollicisation, the transfer of a finger from one hand to the other, joint replacement of finger joints using stainless steel hinge joints and the use of wire to fix bone grafts in the hand. The clinic which Murray established was an early example of a specialist multidisciplinary hand clinic, incorporating physiotherapy and rehabilitation which included vocational training. Hooper considered that this was "the more remarkable for being developed by a young surgeon working in a small, busy hospital in wartime."Morrison considered that Murray's achievements in hand surgery included three which he believed to be the first in the world. These were the first artificial joint prosthesis in hand joints, the first interosseous wiring for finger fractures and the first index finger pollicisation for thumb reconstruction, which had been previously attributed to Gosset, who had published his first paper on the topic in 1949, three years after Murray's publication on the topic.
When medical personnel returning from war service were given preference in appointment to permanent hospital posts in the UK, Murray was not appointed to a permanent post in Edinburgh and worked for a short time at the Royal Oldham Hospital, Lancashire, before returning to Australia in 1948.