Sir WILLIAM MACEWEN

Sir WILLIAM MACEWEN. Obituary. 217 ? b i t u a r \>. Sir WILLIAM MACEWEN, Glasgow. It is hard to believe that Sir William Macewen is dead. All classes of the community have been united in universal regret and a feeling of irreparable loss. His Majesty, with his unfailing good sense and thoughtfulness, sent a message to Lady Macewen in terms which well express the thoughts of the nation:? " The King much regrets to hear of the death of Sir William Macewen. His Majesty will ever gratefully remember the services rendered by him to the Royal family during this and the past reign. I am commanded to express the King's true sympathy with you and your family in your sorrow.? Stamfordham." When Sir William returned in the beginning of the year from his Australasian trip as "Ambassador of the British Medical Association," he was, and expressed himself as being, in excellent health and bright spirits, full of great talk and stories about his world tour. When it was known that he was suffering from influenza and that pneumonia had developed, friends were apprehensive, but good news spread of his satisfactory progress, and our minds were easier. But sudden serious cardiac symptoms supervened, and he died late on the evening of Saturday, 22nd March. Perhaps it is too soon to try to form a true estimate of Sir William Macewen's work, and to suggest his real place amongst the Masters of Medicine. But it is important that some account, however imperfect, of his life and work should now be given. Most sympathetic notices appeared in the daily press intended, it is true, for the non-scientific public, and it will be necessary for us to make free use of these for the facts of his life, especially the admirable article in the Glasgow Herald, written, we believe, by his friend, Dr. Freeland Fergus. 218 Obituary. Sir William Macewen was born in 1848 in the island of Bute, in a house on the Port Bannatyne side of the Skeoch Wood. His father was in business in Rothesay, and in his later years, shortly after the Disruption, was the Master of the Free Church " Yacht Breadalbane, a small schooner which cleared" from Rothesay and conveyed ministers to and fro amongst the Western Isles during summer months, visiting even St. Kilda at least once a year. Sir William Macewen's interest in yachting and his love of the sea are traceable to the hereditary influence. The only time the writer ever saw him excited was when the news that Lord Dunraven's Valkyrie, once a competitor for the America's Cup, had been sunk in a collision while racing off Dunoon. He was the youngest child of a fairly large family, losing both parents at an early age. His elementary education was obtained in Rothesay, and in Glasgow in the Collegiate School. He graduated in Glasgow University M.B., C.M. in 1869, and M.D. in 1872. There are no records of special brilliance as a medical student. The period of his student career was a notable one, in so far as at that time the University of Glasgow possessed some of the most brilliant men of the day. Allen Thomson, Professor of Anatomy, had already proved himself to be a teacher and an anatomist of rare ability, and a pioneer in the new science of embryology. William Tennant Gairdner, who was years afterwards to be a colleague on the Senate and in the Western Infirmary, was early distinguished as a physician and pathologist, and the first to put public health on a sound and practical basis. Andrew Buchanan was Professor of Physiology; he it was who first gave a clear account of the nature of the coagulation of the blood. And last, the greatest of them all, was Lister, with whom Macewen was a student and dresser. It might be supposed that each and all of those teachers should exercise an influence on the mind of Macewen. But there is no trace of any particular influence in the later work. He certainly showed no evidence of being a mechanical, systematic anatomist, nor did he manifest the metaphysical mind of Gairdner, nor the purely biochemical, experimental method of Lister. It is probably true to say of him, as was said of William Cullen, the founder of clinical medicinei "He was one-of the rarest species of the Obituary. 219 man of science?a masterless master." Macewen was not really influenced by any one individual, but was driven along his course by his own bent, his own indomitable will. He was more like John Hunter than any other of the great ones of science, in that he was both naturalist and pathologist and surgeon. It is easy to say that Macewen was born at the right time in the expansion of surgery, when its possibilities were opening up like great tracts of undiscovered country. But a genius such as his would have found undiscovered country to explore in any period. After serving as resident in the Royal Infirmary he became, in 1870, superintendent of Belvidere Fever Hospital. This Hospital was opened in 1865 as a Municipal Fever Hospital, for up to that year fevers had been treated in the Royal Infirmary and in poorhouse hospitals. But he soon found that his scope in zymotic disease was too limited. The necessity of making a living forced him into general practice, and he also became a parochial medical officer. Dr. Alexander Robertson was physician-superintendent of the Parochial Hospital in Parlia- mentary Road, and he gave Macewen many opportunities for surgical practice. The facilities at Dr. Robertson's hand proved exceedingly useful in later years when Macewen was working at cerebral complications of middle-ear disease, Dr. Robertson proving himself to be an enlightened physician who early saw the surgical needs in his cases. In this period, too, he held the office of casualty surgeon to the Central Police Station, where he had ample opportunity of seeing emergency surgery of all kinds. We have often heard him speak of the extraordinary variety of cases and people met with in that work, and of his spending every Saturday night, far on into Sunday morning, in the office, filling in intervals of waiting for cases with fencing, an art in which his long reach made him a formidable antagonist. In 1874 he was admitted to the Fellowship of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons. After holding appointments on the junior staff of the Royal Infirmary, Sir William was, in 1877, at the extraordinarily early age of 29, appointed visiting surgeon. The years from 1877 to 1892, when he left the Royal Infirmary on his appointment a$ Regius Professor of Surgery in the University, were crowded with magnificent achievements. How 220 Obituary. great they were can only be contemplated by study of the list of his published works, and cool criticism of the scientific meaning of his researches. When it is considered that that work was done almost, if not quite, alone, except for the help of assistants, house surgeons, and nurses, that shorthand and the typewriter had not come into use, that a;-rays were not available, that he had to carry on private practice and make his own living, we wonder at the marvellous industry of the man, and think of numberless meals missed and of hours of sleep cut down to less than Napoleonic allowances. As early as 1874 it was evident that wound treatment occu- pied his attention, and that he had accepted fully the Listerian principles of antisepsis. In that year he contributed to this " Journal a paper, entitled Ovariotomy performed and treated antiseptically." The treatment of wounds continued to be of intense interest to him, and papers on the subject rapidly fol- lowed one another: "Wounds in relation to the instruments " which produced them," in 1878; On the immediate treatment of wounds," and "Chromic gut and chicken bone drainage tubes," both in 1881. It was his first article on "Antiseptic osteotomy for genu valgum," published in 1878, that attracted the attention of the medical profession of this country to the fact that a man of more than ordinary ability was at work in the Royal Infirmary of Glasgow. His fame spread throughout the world when his book on Osteotomy was given forth in 1880. This work was no mere record of a series of triumphs in surgical technique. It was a finished study of the etiology and pathology of the bone deformities of rickets, and their surgical treatment. Indeed, it was more; he found that the ordinary carpenter's cutting instruments were quite inadequate for his purpose, and he investigated for himself the toughening and tempering of steel, and ultimately had made for himself osteotomes and chisels, whose quality was tested many times on ox bones before any operation was performed on the rickety legs of the children of the East-End of Glasgow. This book quickly found its place amongst the classics of surgical literature. It was translated into every European language, and the instruments were sold in the German surgical instrument makers' shops almost as soon as they appeared at home. This work illustrates very well a peculiar quality in Macewen's writing. After reading Obituary. 221 it one feels as if there remained nothing more to be said on the subject, that finality had been reached. And, indeed, it was so. This quality permeates all his works. They all bear evidence of the utmost painstaking research, of most diligent inquiry into surgical literature, of enormous accumulation of facts and observations, of careful elaboration of symptomatology, of pathology, and of the operative procedure required?all his own individual work.

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