About the Surgeons:

Mr Leinkram has been a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons since 1981. He trained at the Austin and Repatriation Hospitals in Melbourne.  After obtaining his Fellowship in General Surgery, he worked in England for two years, firstly at the Hammersmith Hospital in London and then at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Bournemouth.

Since commencing private practice in 1982, he has developed a great deal of expertise in short-stay surgery.  More and more types of operations now fall into this category, i.e., day-surgery or overnight-stay surgery.  With careful pre-operative assessment, sound surgical technique and the use of effective post-operative analgesia, operations as diverse as hernia repair, gallstone surgery and thyroid surgery can be done as short-stay cases.

In 2002, Mr Leinkram joined A/Prof Brygel at the Melbourne Hernia Clinic. They both perform the same type of operation for inguinal hernias, i.e. the tension-free mesh hernioplasty, under local anaesthesia with sedation. Over the past 10 years Mr Leinkram has concentrated solely on hernia repairs and abdominoplasties.

Mr Leinkram also takes a special interest in the treatment of incisional hernias. This is a difficult and challenging problem because the patient often presents with a large abdominal swelling which might already have had one or more unsuccessful attempts at being repaired, and the swelling is also quite often associated with an unsightly overhang of abdominal skin and subcutaneous fat. Mr Leinkram has developed extensive experience in repairing these incisional hernias and at times combines this with an abdominoplasty (tummy-tuck). He has been performing abdominoplasties for over 20 years.

A/Prof. Maurice Brygel has retired from operative surgery but is still teaching office surgical skills to GP’s. Maurice was inspired to concentrate on hernia surgery after visiting renowned hernia centres in the United States of America and Canada. He then founded the Melbourne Hernia Clinic, and practised hernia surgery for almost 50 years. Maurice is a pioneer in day surgery hernia repair, having performed over 10,000 hernia operations mostly using local anaesthesia. He has become known as the “HERNIA KING” after establishing the first hernia clinics in Australia, the Melbourne Hernia Clinic and the Sydney Hernia Centre. He was one of the first to introduce the use of mesh routinely into hernia surgery.

Today Maurice focuses on teaching office surgical skills to GP’S. He is also a pioneer in this field developing and presenting “hands on” workshops long before surgical skills laboratories became fashionable. Maurice teaches office surgical skills to GP’s in association with academic bodies and private institutions throughout Australia and internationally, such as ARIMGAS and Health Cert. Further details of his workshops can be found here:

He has an extensive multimedia collection of his own work first published under the title Video Book Of Surgery of which over 7000 copies were distributed throughout Australia. Maurice published with Dr Gary O’Hearn ‘Exploring Essential Surgery’ and ‘Exploring Essential Radiology’ with Mcgraw-Hill on their subscription websites over 10 years ago. These are still popular today. Maurice is a regular contributor to the World Journal of Family Medicine on a diverse range of topics extending from haemorrhoids to hernias. Maurice has also published a wide range of peer-reviewed academic papers on many surgical topics. Many of these papers can be found here: Maurice Brygel – Google Scholar