Named in honour of David Patey, the Patey Prize is the highest award given by the Surgical Research Society and is widely considered to be one of the leading prizes for surgical research. The Patey Prize is awarded to the person presenting the best paper at the annual meeting of the society. The person reading the paper must be the principal researcher and first author of the presented work. The prize consists of a certificate, a monetary award and an invitation to attend the Society of University Surgeons (the USA equivalent of the SRS). The paper can not have been presented previously at a national or international meeting and must not have been published at the time of presentation.
David Patey MS FRCS (1899–1977) was a General Surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital in London. He won the Broderip Scholarship, the hospital’s highest undergraduate award for final year students, and qualified MB BS (London) in 1923 with gold medal and honours in surgery. He passed the FRCS in 1924 and was awarded an MS for research in 1927. He won the Royal College of Surgeons of England Jacksonian Prize and held Hunterian Professorships in 1931 and 1964.
Patey had wide interests in surgery but was best known for describing the modified radical mastectomy (Patey mastectomy), which involved excision of the pectoralis minor muscle to facilitate axillary lymph node dissection but preservation of the pectoralis major. It was therefore less invasive than the traditional Halsted radical mastectomy.
Patey founded the Surgical Research Society in 1954 and this was, arguably, his greatest contribution and legacy to surgery. He became the third president of the society in 1958. David Patey was a reserved and modest man of great integrity. Nonetheless, he could be a fierce critic of poorly formulated ideas, an ethos that was adopted by the SRS for many decades.