James Henderson Nicholl

James Henderson Nicoll FRCS(G), JP (30 September 1863 – 15 August 1921) was a Scottish paediatric surgeon and professor of surgery at Anderson's University. Nicoll was most notable for developing a surgical cure for pyloric stenosis and outpatient care of children with spina bifida, and was known as the "father of day surgery".

Life Nicoll was the son of Reverend James Nicoll, who was a distinguished minister in Glasgow. Nicoll undertook his early education at Glasgow Academy before attending to study medicine at the University of Glasgow at age 16, and graduating at the age of 23 with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MB CM Glasgow) in 1886. He decided to specialise in surgery, and after taking a junior house post at the Western Infirmary, under Sir Hector Clare Cameron, Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University of Glasgow and Western Infirmary and Sir Thomas McCall Anderson, Raymond Poincaré, then Rector of the University of Glasgow, nominated Nicoll to the assessor on the University Court.

Contributions Nicoll was an advocate for day surgery and published a paper in the British Medical Journal about his experiences of the approximately 9000 paediatric surgical patients, most of whom he operated on, alone at the Dispensary. Nichol believed inpatient treatment to be a waste of hospital resources, as the results obtained at the Dispensary were equally as good but at a fraction of the cost. He believed that carefully selected children recovered at home, in the care of their family, provided they were given the necessary education and information to care for their child. Nichol believed that by removing children from their inpatient beds, their treatment and recovery would be of a higher quality. In the paper, Nicoll stated:

for seven years I have had a small house, near the Glasgow Children's Hospital, for the accommodation of young infants and their mothers. The mothers are catered for, and themselves nurse their infants. My experience of the cases so treated has been such as to make me confident in the opinion that no children's hospital can be considered complete which has not, in the hospital or hard by, accommodation for a certain number of nursing mothers whose infants require operation.

Between 1899 and 1901 he undertook 406 cleft lip and cleft palate operations using chloroform as the anaesthetic in the majority of cases. He reported to the British Medical Journal that in a series of 8988 operations performed in the Dispensary, he performed 7392 by himself. Around half of these patients were aged 3 years or younger, with many under 1 year old.