From opera buffa to opera seria: anniversaries of Royal College of Surgeons of England research initiatives

摘要: This year, 2023, is the anniversary of three initiatives of the Royal College of Surgeons of England: 30 years of the Research Fellowship Scheme, 25 years of the Clinical Effectiveness Unit, and 10 years of the Clinical Research Initiative. During the previous century it was argued that surgical clinical research was faltering, and 27 years have elapsed since Richard Horton’s now infamous editorial ‘Surgical research or comic opera: questions, but few answers’ was critical of surgical research 1. The editorial went on to state ‘cynics might even claim the personal attributes that go to make a successful surgeon differ from those needed for collaborative multicentre research’. Furthermore, Horton quoted the words of medical statistician Major Greenwood from 1923,‘I should like to shame (surgeons) out of the comic opera performances which they suppose are statistics of operations’. Horton stated that, in surgery journals …