ABSTRACT
Wilfred Trotter's prospects of a successful surgical career were already excellent, although a more showy colleague, Rupert Bucknall, had forestalled him by being made assistant surgeon to University College Hospital in 1901. Towards the end of that year Trotter made the startling suggestion that psychoanalysts should "set up" together in Harley Street and join those residents, at that time fewer than two hundred in number, whose brass plates in that street announced their claim to be consultant physicians or surgeons. Davies, a young surgeon who soon after was appointed to the staff of University College Hospital, was one of the pioneers of thoracic surgery, but a few years later a disabling condition, contracted in his work, compelled him to exchange the surgical for the medical aspects. Trotter severed six, or perhaps seven, nerves in Davies's arms, and they made the most minute investigation of the healing processes.
