Brewis Dreadon
In 1937, a Braemar doctor performed a ground-breaking operation on a four-month old Hamilton boy. Brewis Dreadon, now 74, says he probably would not be alive if it weren’t for the skill and the courage of his surgeon…
Brewis Dreadon’s parents were so grateful to the surgeon who operated on him as an infant that they named him after the man they believed saved his life.
“I was originally named Bruce, but after the doctor, Edward Cecil Brewis successfully operated on me, my parents changed my name to Brewis,” says Mr Dreadon, who will turn 75 this year. “I think they owed him a deep gift of gratitude.”
Brewis was born with spina bifida (Latin for “split spine), a developmental congenital disorder caused by the incomplete closing of the embryonic neural tube. Some vertebrae overlaying the spinal cord are not fully formed and remain unfused and open allowing a portion of the spinal cord to protrude through the opening in the bones.
While Brewis’ form of spina bifida – meningocle – was not the most serious, it was still considered life threatening. “Dr Brewis told my parents I would die if something wasn’t done,” he says. His parents were also told there were no guarantees the operation would be successful. For this reason, the operation was done free of charge.
Dr Brewis was one of three general practitioners (along with Dr Duncan McDiarmid and Dr William Fea) performing surgery at Braemar at the time. He had never operated on a spina bifida patient and travelled to Melbourne to consult medical colleagues before carrying out the procedure when Brewis was four months old. The case, which was believed to have been the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, was later written up in the British Medical Journal.
Brewis says his parents told him little about the operation. “I think Mum found it very difficult. I was the youngest of three children. Very little was known about spina bifida then.” But when he met Dr Brewis as a teenager, the surgeon told him the operation was extremely hard. “He told me I had a growth as big as my head. The hard part was having to cut the nerves. There was no microsurgery in those days. He must have been extremely skilled.”
He says he didn’t realise the significance of his operation until he was 18 when Dr Brewis asked him to attend a medical conference in Hamilton.
“Dr Brewis called me up and said he wanted me to appear with him. There were five or six other people with medical conditions.”
He describes the occasion and very grand. “Dr Brewis was very correct and quite imposing.” He wore a bowler hat and kid gloves and drove a Humber Pullman (a limousine of a similar length to the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud). An obituary in the British Medical Journal described him as having a “commanding personality and presence standing over 6ft tall, with a Guards bearing and distinguished by a monocle.” He was also a competent boxer.
“When we arrived at the conference, I was ushered into the auditorium. There were about 50 learned people there. I had to take off my shirt and show the audience my back while Dr Brewis rattled off the information.” He says at one stage someone asked if he had had any subsequent difficulties. “Before I could say anything I was ushered off the stage with my shirt in my hand.”
Dr Brewis died in 1972 aged 73.
Brewis says, while the operation was successful, and he is very grateful that the decision was made to go ahead, he has been restricted in some activities. “I wasn’t allowed to indulge in contact sports, so rugby was out of the question. Also I never learned to swim. I think that was because there was concern the other kids would tease me because of my scars.” His teenage years were also restrained. “I didn’t lead a wild life because I couldn’t. I had to be careful about drinking because of the medication I was on.”
He also had to alter his career choice. “I had my heart set on going farming. But I couldn’t have done the heavy lifting, so when I was 15 I left school and went into menswear.”
Sixty years later, he is still working in the same field and has advised many of Hamilton’s business leaders about fashion. He currently works at Munns the Man’s Shop.
He says while he has had to pace himself these days – and still suffers chronic daily pain – he has kept fit and until relatively recently was running regularly.
“My late wife was asthmatic and when our son was five, we decided he should take up running to build up his stamina. I went running with him and it continued from there.”
In 2003, his son, now a solicitor with a British telecommunications company – and formerly a serious middle-distance runner – challenged his father to run the Paris Marathon with him.
“I had only twelve weeks to train and I wasn’t able to train as often as I should. The schedule called for two or three long runs a week and I only managed one.”
He completed the marathon in just over five hours but felt wretched. “There was this voice in my head saying, ‘keep going; you haven’t come all this way to give up’. I thought it was my back but 10 months later I had a heart attack and they discovered I had four blocked arteries. No wonder I felt bad. They said I could have died during the marathon.”
After his heart operation, he continued running for five years.
Brewis says he was never expected to make old bones but he has outlived all other members of his family. His sister died of leukemia aged 32 and his brother died at 67. Brewis’ wife died in 2008. The couple had been married for 37 years.
He says the advances in medical science in relation to spina bifida are amazing. “I have been lucky. I was not at the severe end of the scale. But I have huge respect for people with spina bifida who go on to accomplish amazing things, especially sportspeople. When I have been in pain and feeling down, I’ve had to tell myself to harden up.”
He says his doctors – including Jack Gudex and his longtime doctor Leo Revell – have always been supportive of him pushing himself. And he is pleased that he has been able to continue working in menswear for so long. “One customer said to me recently, ‘you sold me a suit when you were at Chandler House (considered one of Hamilton’s most sumptuous department stores in the 1970s) – and I’ve still got the suit’. I like that. I want someone to go out feeling good about what they have bought.”
