Waugh Dressing Forceps — Great Ormond Street Heritage

George Ernst Waugh (1875-1940), assistant surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children Great Ormond Street London from 1905 and one of the founding figures of modern paediatric surgery as a distinct specialty, designed his dressing forceps for the delicate intraperitoneal handling of infant bowel during the abdominal surgery he pioneered in the early twentieth century. The Waugh forceps has a longer narrower jaw than the Adson and a more pronounced spring action — calibrated for the thinner peritoneum and the smaller vascular structures of paediatric anatomy.

The Great Ormond Street tradition

GOSH was the first hospital in the world devoted entirely to children (founded 1852), and Waugh’s generation established the principle that paediatric surgical care required dedicated specialist surgeons rather than adult surgeons operating on children. The instruments developed at GOSH — the Waugh dressing forceps, the Denis Browne paediatric retractor, the Holter shunt — defined the technical infrastructure of paediatric surgical practice. The Waugh forceps remains the everyday dressing forceps in paediatric trays across British and Commonwealth practice.

Why this matters for paediatric outcomes

Paediatric surgical morbidity correlates with operator experience and with instrument fit — the right forceps for an infant prevents the tissue injury that the wrong-sized forceps inflicts. Adult forceps in paediatric work is a documented source of avoidable bowel-wall haematoma and lengthened recovery.