Robert Dyke Acland

Robert D. Acland, MBBS, FRCS (20 June 1941 – 6 January 2016) was a British surgeon and academic. A pioneer in plastic and reconstructive surgery, he was the younger son of Richard Acland and his wife Anne. He developed one of the first microsurgical instruments, the Acland micro-vessel clamp, as well as the 10-0 nylon sutures and needles that are still used today. He published the first edition of Acland's Practice Manual for Micro-vascular Surgery, also known as the "Red Book", a manual on microsurgical techniques (1997). The current edition was revised in 2008 and is still an essential tool for any trainee in microsurgical techniques and fundamentals of surgical microscopes and their use.

Acland was also a clinical anatomist and became a pioneer in the field of fresh tissue dissection. From 1981 to 2011, he established and ran the Fresh Tissue Anatomy Dissection Laboratory for surgeons and students at the University of Louisville.

Acland's major published work consists of the comprehensive Video Atlas of Human Anatomy. The video atlas depicts moving structures and pioneers new and highly effective techniques of anatomical videography for a clear three-dimensional understanding of spatial relationships. The unique dynamic and 3-D perspective was achieved using innovative camera rotation techniques pioneered at the University of Louisville School of Medicine.

Early life and education

Robert Acland was born on 20 June 1941, in Exeter, England, Although Richard Acland was a member of the landed gentry, he held left-wing political views; he was a Labour member of Parliament (MP) and one of the founders of the far-left Common Wealth Party, which promoted common ownership of land. In 1944 Richard Acland donated the ancestral estate of Killerton to the National Trust. Owned by the Aclands since the 17th century, Killerton consisted of a manor house and several thousand acres near Exeter. As they would not be able to rely on Killerton for financial support, Richard Acland told his sons that they would have to "make it on their own by being better, not by heredity."

Robert Acland grew up in the dower house at Killerton. He went to the village school and then to Bryanston School in Dorset, where he said he developed "a great interest in breaking rules." He had the opportunity to learn carpentry and welding at Bryanston, practical skills that he would later put to use as a surgeon. In 1969 Acland spent a year as a senior registrar in general surgery in Swindon, Acland then trained as a registrar in plastic surgery at Canniesburn Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, from 1972 to 1975.

Career While at Canniesburn Hospital, Acland performed meticulous microsurgery operations that could last up to 14 hours. The medical establishment at the NHS was displeased with him taking up so much time in the operating room, and he came to see that the NHS was not the place for his perfectionism. In 1975 he accepted an offer to set up a microsurgery teaching laboratory at the Kleinert-Kutz Hand Center in Louisville, Kentucky. Kleinert had also established the Christine M. Kleinert Fellowship in Hand Surgery in 1960 to give surgical residents more experience with hand surgery. He realized that the fellowship needed to improve its teaching of microsurgery, and invited Acland to set up a teaching laboratory at the suggestion of Graham Lister, a plastic surgeon who had joined Kleinert's practice and who had trained with Acland at Canniesburn Hospital.

Acland played a key role in the founding of the University of Louisville's fresh tissue dissection laboratory in 1981. A retired surgeon, Herbert Wald, asked Acland and two other surgeons, Harold Kleinert and Gordon Tobin, to help pay for a large walk-in refrigerator for unembalmed cadaver preservation. While it was immediately useful, Tobin thought that it resembled a dungeon cell, located as it was in the basement of a University of Louisville medical building. His goal in producing the video atlas was to dissect lightly embalmed cadavers in order to preserve natural tissue appearance and demonstrate structures moving as they would in the living body. He also wanted to help students understand three-dimensional anatomical relationships by rotating the camera around specimens. Acland considered the project to be his personal "Sistine Chapel". A fellow student at the London Hospital Medical College, she became a psychiatrist and accompanied him when he moved to the United States in 1975. to whom he was married until his death in 2016. According to Sarah, as of 2016 all three wives live in the Louisville area and get along well.

Illness and death Acland was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, or bile duct cancer, in September 2014. He died on 6 January 2016, some 16 months later, at age 74.