ABSTRACT
The Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Malaya (in Singapore) was established in 1952. Prior to this, the teaching of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University was undertaken by the Department of Surgery under the Professor of Surgery and Professor of Clinical Surgery. From a course consisting of 15 weekly classes on fractures for 18 undergraduates in the late 1930s, and the clinical postings in orthopaedic surgery for over 40 students in 1952, the programme now encompasses an exposure to musculoskeletal diseases and trauma in all 5 years of the undergraduate course. Over this time, the spectrum of clinical conditions has also changed, and with it the emphasis on the conditions to be taught; from that dealing primarily with tuberculosis of bones and joints, poliomyelitis, and childhood deformity, to those resulting from degenerative disorders, sports injuries, industrial and motor vehicle accidents, and cancer. The students are now taught orthopaedic surgery in all the major public hospitals. Local postgraduate training programmes for orthopaedic surgery started in the 1980s. From 1993, a more structured training and assessment programme was introduced for basic and advanced training in surgery and orthopaedics. Advanced trainees rotate through the various teaching hospitals to expose them to a wider range of orthopaedic problems as well as teachers. The postgraduate training programme is now well established, and Singapore is accredited by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh as an orthopaedic training centre for higher surgical training.
In looking at the history of orthopaedic education in Singapore, one must place our local setting in the worldwide perspective. Officially, the academic Department of Orthopaedic Surgery in Singapore (in what was then the University of Malaya, now the National University of Singapore) was only set up in 1952, nearly fifty years after the founding of the Medical School in Singapore in 1905. Up till that time, orthopaedic surgery in Singapore, and orthopaedic education in the Medical School, was carried out at the Department of Surgery. It must, however, be realised that as a separate and distinct academic discipline, orthopaedic surgery is mostly a phenomenon of the 20th century. Even though the practice of clinical orthopaedics has been in evidence throughout the centuries since ancient Egyptian times, orthopaedic surgery as an entity practised by specialised orthopaedic surgeons evolved relatively recently. It was mainly in the early 1900s that new institutions and associations that established Orthopaedic Surgery as an individual and growing specialty were set up. Orthopaedic surgery as a separate academic discipline was an even more recent phenomenon, with the first Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery in Britain being conferred on Girdlestone at Oxford only in 1937. Taken in this context, the development of orthopaedic education in Singapore has not lagged too far behind.
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