The logic of surgery

Abstract

This is the first P. P. Debono memorial lecture, instituted by the "Association of Surgeons and Physicians of Malta", delivered on the 30th October 1969 at the Medical School of the University. A commemoration of professor Peter Paul Debono, who occupied the Chair of Surgery at the Royal University of Malta from 1926 to 1951. He was a supreme teacher, the pioneer of scientific surgery in Malta and an exemplary family man. He had a sense of humour and a charm of his own once you got to know him, being kind hearted and deeply religious. Debono's early days surgical diagnosis depended largely on symptoms and physical signs and the methods of reaching it were summarised in his dictum. He himself was an outstanding diagnostician but that was due to his extensive experience as a doctor rather than to that miserable aphorism. Another of his tenets was that not everything new or recently popular was necessarily better, and if an operation had given him good results he would cling to it irrespective of any change in fashion.