Sir William Macewen was one of the towering surgeons of his age, and Glasgow was the theatre of nearly his whole career. A direct pupil of Joseph Lister, he took his teacher’s revolution in antiseptic surgery and pushed it further into strict asepsis; and on the operating tables of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the Western Infirmary he did things no surgeon had reliably done before — opening the human skull to remove tumours and clots, and treating bone as the living, growing tissue it is. If Lister made surgery safe, Macewen showed how far, once it was safe, surgery could go.
Lister’s Pupil
He was born on 22 June 1848 at Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, into a boat-building family — his career, though, belonged wholly to Glasgow. He was schooled in the city and took his medical degrees at the University of Glasgow, MB CM in 1869 and MD in 1872, studying surgery under Joseph Lister himself. Where Lister used carbolic sprays and dressings to kill germs during operations, Macewen came to insist on preventing their entry altogether — sterilised instruments, scrubbed hands, boiled gowns — the aseptic method that is the basis of the modern operating theatre. Appointed a full surgeon at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in 1877, at just twenty-nine, he had the safe conditions in which to attempt the previously unthinkable.
The Opening of the Skull
Macewen’s boldest advances were in the brain. Building on the new science of cerebral localisation — the mapping of function to particular regions of the brain by researchers such as David Ferrier and Hughlings Jackson — he reasoned that a lesion could be located from a patient’s symptoms and then reached by the knife. In 1879 he successfully removed a brain tumour, among the earliest such operations ever performed; he drained abscesses and clots that had until then meant certain death. He described a method of passing a tube into the windpipe to give anaesthesia — orotracheal intubation, still in daily use — and left his name on the anatomy of the skull in ‘Macewen’s triangle’. His Atlas of Head Sections of 1893 was illustrated with fifty-three copperplate engravings he cut himself, and he was among the first surgeons anywhere to use photography to teach.
Bone as Living Tissue
He was as inventive with the skeleton as with the skull. Recognising that bone is living tissue capable of growth and repair, Macewen pioneered bone grafting, implanting fragments to rebuild limbs that had lost their own; he devised the operation still called ‘Macewen’s osteotomy’ to straighten the bowed legs of children crippled by rickets, then rife in the Glasgow slums, and designed the chisel-like osteotome to perform it. With Matron Rebecca Strong at the Royal Infirmary he helped devise a systematic training school for nurses that was copied around the world — recognising, as few surgeons then did, that the operation is only half the cure.
The Regius Chair and Erskine
In 1892 Macewen was appointed Regius Professor of Surgery at the University of Glasgow — the chair Lister had held before him — and moved his work to the Western Infirmary; he had been surgeon to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children since 1883, and was knighted in 1902. His last great service came in the First World War. In 1916 he helped found the Princess Louise Scottish Hospital for limbless sailors and soldiers at Erskine, on the Clyde, and became its first chief surgeon; and, in a wholly Glaswegian collaboration, he designed the light, jointed ‘Erskine limb’ with the engineers of the Yarrow shipyard, whose men built the prosthetics as they built ships. He died in Glasgow on 22 March 1924.
His page belongs in this chapter beside Lister’s as the second half of Glasgow’s surgical revolution: the man who took a city made safe for surgery and used it to open the skull, rebuild the skeleton, and re-limb the wounded of the shipyards he had lived among.
The Glasgow connection
Macewen’s Glasgow is the city’s medical map: the Glasgow Royal Infirmary where he became a surgeon at twenty-nine, the Western Infirmary he led as Regius Professor, the Royal Hospital for Sick Children he served, and Erskine on the Clyde — the limb hospital he helped found, whose artificial legs he designed with the shipwrights of Yarrow.
People also ask
Who was William Macewen?
A pioneering Glasgow surgeon regarded as one of the fathers of modern brain surgery — a man who, on the wards of the city’s infirmaries, did things with the knife that no surgeon had reliably done before.
What is William Macewen famous for?
Above all for brain surgery: he was among the first surgeons anywhere to locate and successfully remove a brain tumour, in 1879. He also pioneered bone grafting, described the tube-in-the-windpipe method of anaesthesia still used today, and designed the ‘Erskine limb’ for the war-wounded.
Was William Macewen from Glasgow?
His career belonged entirely to Glasgow — the Royal and Western Infirmaries and the University — but he was born on the Isle of Bute, at Rothesay, in 1848, into a boat-building family.
What was Macewen’s connection to Joseph Lister?
He was Joseph Lister’s pupil at Glasgow. Macewen took his teacher’s antiseptic revolution further, into strict asepsis, and in 1892 succeeded to the very Regius chair of surgery that Lister had held. If Lister made surgery safe, Macewen showed how far it could then go.
What did William Macewen invent?
The chisel-like osteotome and the bone operation still called ‘Macewen’s osteotomy’; a method of intubating the windpipe for anaesthesia; and, in the First World War, the light artificial ‘Erskine limb’, designed with the engineers of the Yarrow shipyard for limbless sailors and soldiers.
When did William Macewen die?
He died in Glasgow on 22 March 1924, aged 75, knighted and honoured as one of the great surgeons of his age.