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As a young surgeon arriving at St Thomas' Hospital after the second world war, Frank Cockett was put in charge of the leg ulcer clinic which, a friend and colleague explains, was "thought by his seniors to be a non-exciting clinic dealing with a non-exciting condition, the cause of which was poorly understood." He threw himself into it and made several major breakthroughs, becoming an international authority on venous disease.
"As a junior surgeon I took over the leg ulcer clinic in 1949, and for the first time I saw what an enormous unsolved problem there was. Of course all were called varicose ulcers, but most of them had no varicose veins," he wrote in a 10 volume autobiography compiled for his family.
In 1953-after carrying out numerous cadaver limb dissections and investigations on his patients, using the new technique of arterial and venous injections-he established that lower leg ulcers were caused not by varicose veins but by incompetent ankle perforating veins.
He published a groundbreaking paper in the Lancet, describing his research and identifying a new condition, which he called the ankle blowout syndrome. 1 Since then, tens of thousands of patients have undergone the " Cockett operation," which heals the ulcer by ligating the veins.
Cockett was also interested in venous compression syndromes and published widely on anatomical compression of the left iliac vein. 2 His major textbook, written with Harold Dodd, Pathology...