Hugh Stack was born in Bristol on 7 December 1915, the third son of Edward H. E. Stack FRCS, an ophthalmic surgeon at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, and his wife Caroline, née Kennedy. He was educated at Clifton College, following which he received a scholarship to study chemistry at Bristol University. He then switched career and enrolled into medicine at St Bartholemew's Hospital in London, three years later. He married Lorna Cooke MRCP, in 1955. They had a daughter, Caroline, and a son, Charles, who became an anaesthetist.
Career
Stack first worked as a house surgeon at Addenbrooke's Hospital, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital and the Miller General Hospital, Greenwich, after which he served for two years in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He was then honorary demonstrator in anatomy at King's College, London, and subsequently a surgical registrar at the North Middlesex Hospital. He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1951 and from then on practised as an orthopaedic surgeon. He then held appointments at the Miller Hospital and St Bartholomew's Hospital, the Albert Dock Orthopaedic and Fracture Hospital, and the Harold Wood and Brentwood District Hospitals. It was while he was at St Bartholomew's that he became interested in reconstructive surgery of the hand in which he was influenced by Jackson Burrows, Osmond Clark, Norman Capener and Guy Pulvertaft. In 1969, he wrote an influential article which highlighted the importance of naming the fingers rather than numbering them, to avoid surgery on the wrong finger. In 1973, he was secretary of the Second Hand Club and was instrumental in the merger of the British hand surgery organisations to become the British Society for Surgery of the Hand. He was the first editor of The Hand, the forerunner of the Journal of Hand Surgery. He devised a splint for the management of soft tissue mallet fingers. In 1970, he was elected Hunterian Professor by the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Death and legacy
Stack died on 28 May 1992. The Graham Stack travelling fellowship is awarded in his memory.
Selected publications
Articles
, pp. 152–4.
, British Society for Surgery of the Hand, 1975,.
Lectures
Arris Gale lecture: "A Study of Muscle Function in the Fingers", Royal College of Surgeons, 28 May 1963.
Hunterian lecture: "The palmar fascia, and the development of deformities and displacemants in Dupuytren's contracture", Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons England. 1971.
Chapters
"Tumours" in R. Guy Pulvertaft Clinical Surgery: Volume 7 The Hand. Butterworths, 1966. pp. 208–228.
