Faithful but unfortunate: Churchill and his shoulder

The centenary of the end of the First World War allows an opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned from dissent, not only in political life but also in shoulder surgery. It is not commonly known that the young Winston Churchill had an unstable shoulder that was to affect him from his younger days into his later career. Although he chose to treat his shoulder problem conservatively, one of his contemporaries, ASB Bankart proposed a surgical approach that has come to be the 'gold standard' of management of the unstable shoulder. This paper reviews the historical record of Churchill's shoulder instability and the lessons he learned from his experience.