An Extraordinary History


1872	Wingfield Convalescent Home was opened on the site now occupied by the NOC. It was funded by public donations, principally £1,545 from Mrs Hannah Wingfield, who did not live to see the project completed.
1914	The Home became an auxiliary hospital to the Third Southern General Hospital at the outbreak of the first world war. The increase in patients led to wooden huts being built in the grounds, including orthopaedic workshops due to the nature of many of the injuries.
1921	The home officially became an orthopaedic hospital.
1924	The buildings were improved and the Home became an open air hospital, with 125 beds and three private wards.
1930	A donation of some £70,000 from William Morris (later Lord Nuffield) made the rebuilding of the hospital possible.
1933	The Prince of Wales officially opened the Wingfield-Morris Orthopaedic Hospital
1937	G R Girdlestone, who treated patients during the first world war, became the first British Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery in 1937.
1948	The hospital became part of the newly founded NHS.
1950	Wingfield-Morris Orthopaedic Hospital was renamed the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre (NOC). It became the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre NHS Trust on 1st April 1991.

Orthopaedics was recognised as an academic discipline when Gaythorne Girdlestone was appointed as the first Nuffield Professor of Orthopaedics at Oxford in 1937. He was succeeded in 1949 by Josep Trueta (who came to Oxford, having worked extensively with casualties in the Spanish civil war in the late 1930s).

Nuffield Professors since then have been:

1966 Robert Duthie

1992 John Kenwright

2002 Andrew Carr

A donation has enabled the appointment of a new Chair of Orthopaedic Research, the Norman Collisson Chair, which is at present held by Professor Graham Russell. He and his scientists moved into the new Oxford University Institute of Musculoskeletal Science, the Botnar Research Centre, in March 2002.

Girdlestone Orthopaedic Society

Professor Josep Trueta and his colleagues founded this society in 1950. Membership is open to all those who have spent a significant part of their training in orthopaedics in Oxford. There is an annual three day scientific conference. At its founding the following paragraph was written which reflects the Society's 'mission statement', as it would now be defined:

'As the years go by most of us feel an increasing admiration and gratitude to those who are responsible for our upbringing and we feel an increasing appreciation for your friendship and understanding among people. Some of the men that owe their orthopaedic training to the school built by Girdlestone and who feel that it provided for them not only a school but in the intellectual sense a family as well, feel the need for an organisation that will keep alive the spirit of this family" [G.Mineiro 1958].