John Wickham
Urologist who pioneered minimally invasive surgery
JOHN WICKHAM, who has died aged 89, was a urologist who pioneered keyhole surgery in Britain, using small incisions and specialised instruments to reduce scarring and aid patients’ recovery.
Appointed as a consultant urological surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in 1966, Wickham soon set about tackling what he saw as a gung-ho attitude among certain staff. At that time many surgeons prided themselves on being able to perform a wide range of procedures, and patients often needed several weeks to recover from their ministrations. To Wickham, who had initially considered a career in neurosurgery and had witnessed the extraordinary delicacy of operations on the brain, the scars left by more general surgeries seemed brutal and unnecessary. “I was fed up taking out tiny little [kidney] stones and going to the patient the following day and saying ‘look, we got your stone out!’, with a socking great gash,” he recalled.
Searching for an easier way to rid the body of kidney stones, Wickham and his colleague Michael Kellett embraced a new technique called percutaneous nephrolithotomy. This involved making a tiny incision in a patient’s back and threading in a tube through which the stone could then be removed.
Wickham coined the term “minimally invasive therapy” to describe this approach. In 1992 he and another colleague, Malcolm Coptcoat, managed to remove an entire kidney through an incision less than half an inch across, in the first procedure of its kind in Britain. They detached the kidney from the surrounding tissue and sealed it – still inside the body – in a watertight bag. The kidney was then minced up using an instrument called a morcellator and sucked out through the incision. Patients undergoing this procedure could expect to be out of hospital in a few days, and well on the road to recovery within a fortnight.
John Ewart Alfred Wickham was born in Chichester, West Sussex, on December 10 1927. His father Alfred worked in event management until his sudden death in 1931. John then moved with his mother Hilda to a flat at Littlehampton. At Chichester High School for Boys he studied botany, physics and chemistry and spent his free time collecting scrap metal from downed aircraft. In 1942 he joined the school’s Air Training Corps and learnt how to dismantle and repair aircraft engines – an experience that would inform a later passion for restoring vintage sports cars.
After the war Wickham did National Service with the RAF before completing his clinical studies at Barts. For his final exam he was asked to look at a patient with a cardiac complaint, and was mortified to report that he could find no sign of any abnormality. “That’s all right,” the examiner replied: “neither did we.” He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1959, and was awarded his Master’s degree in 1966.
Throughout his career Wickham strove to improve upon the equipment available to him in theatre. He set up his own clinic in Welbeck Street and began treating patients with a machine that disintegrated kidney stones using high-energy shock waves. In 1992 he moved to Guy’s Hospital and teamed up with a robotics specialist, Professor Brian Davies, to build the world’s first special-purpose surgical robot. The “Probot” was successfully tested on around 30 patients requiring surgery on the prostate gland.
Wickham met his future wife, Ann Loney, in the operating theatre while he was performing a belowthe-knee amputation. Struck by the “beautiful blue eyes” visible over the top of her surgical mask, he invited her out on a pub crawl. They were married in 1961, just 18 months after that first encounter. She survives him, along with their three daughters.
John Wickham, born December 10 1927, died October 26 2017