After the war, he returned to Manchester, working at the Salford Royal Hospital. It was here, in 1925 that Jefferson performed the first successful embolectomy in England. By 1934, he was a neurosurgeon at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, becoming the UK's first professor of neurosurgery at the University of Manchester five years later. The Jefferson fracture, which he was the first to describe, was named after him. Manchester Royal Infirmary also honours Jefferson with the Jefferson Suite, a training area in their Medical Education Campus.
The University of Manchester Library holds a collection of papers relating to Jefferson, which includes details of his early research and professional correspondence, more details of which can be found here. The University of Manchester also holds a significant collection of Jefferson's patient files, numbering approximately 3,500, which are as yet uncatalogued.
In April 2021, a partnership between the Manchester Centre for Clinical Neurosciences (part of the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust), The University of Manchester and the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre opened a new centre for discovery science and experimental medicine to rapidly translate research into healthcare benefit. The Centre develops new treatments and interventions to improve outcomes and transform the lives of patients with neurological disease and was named Geoffrey Jefferson Brain Research Centre in his honour.
Sources
So That Was Life: A Biography of Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, Master of the Neurosciences and Man of Letters, Peter H. Schurr, Royal Society of Medicine Press, 1997.
