Henry Souttar

Sir Henry Sessions Souttar (1875 to 1964) was a British surgeon who came to medicine from mathematics and engineering. Born in Birkenhead, he read mathematics at Queen's College, Oxford, then qualified in medicine at the London Hospital, where he later became assistant surgeon. His engineering training led him to design and make his own surgical instruments, among them a flanged tube for obstructions of the gullet, a steam cautery for breaking-down tumours and ulcers, and a craniotome for opening the skull, while his mathematics made him a leading voice on radium dosage and the first British guidelines for radiotherapy. In 1925 he operated on a young woman with mitral valve disease, reaching the valve through the appendage of the left atrium with a finger, an operation later regarded as a landmark in cardiac surgery. His physician colleagues judged it unjustified and he was allowed to do it only once, and the next operations of this type were done by others in 1948. He served at the Belgian field hospital at Antwerp in 1914, was knighted in 1949, and held senior offices at the Royal College of Surgeons and the British Medical Association.