Walter Mercer

In the second half of the 20th century, the major improvements in the results of surgery brought about by the spectacular advance of clinical science tended to obscure, if not actually to downgrade the importance of operative craftsmanship in the total care of surgical patients. Technical expertise is, however, regaining its former status amongst the attributes of a successful surgeon and time spent in a surgical skills laboratory has become an essential component of training at both basic and advanced levels.

It is appropriate, therefore, to celebrate the career and salute the achievements of a great Scottish surgeon who, through his astonishing clinical versatility and supreme operative dexterity, became truly a legend in his own lifetime.

Walter Mercer, the son of a tweed mill owner, was born at Stow, Midlothian in 1890 and educated in Edinburgh at George Watson’s College and at Edinburgh University from which he graduated MBChB in 1912. During World War I he served with the RAMC on the Western Front, mostly as a regimented medical officer in some of the bloodiest battles and part of his time in the trenches was spent with the battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, commanded for several months by Winston Churchill. Towards the end of the war he was seconded to the surgical division of a field hospital and this was the start of what was to become a brilliant surgical career.

In 1921 Mercer obtained the Fellowship of the College and four years later he was appointed to the staff of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh as assistant surgeon in the wards of Professor John (later Sir John) Fraser (q.v.). There he took responsibility for the management of all fractures and most of the orthopaedic cases which, in those days, long before the full development of the specialties were treated in the general surgical wards. He did not, however, restrict himself to fractures and orthopaedics and soon developed a reputation for outstanding technical skill in other areas of surgery.

In 1932 he published his famous magnum opus “Orthopaedic Surgery” which ran to six editions in his lifetime and was translated into several foreign languages. For many years this was the foremost British didactic text in orthopaedics and its success was an impressive achievement for a single handed author.

Mercer was a popular and effective teacher at the bedside or in the out-patient clinic and his instructional imitations of the abnormal gaits associated with various orthopaedic conditions acquired a celebrity which many a professional entertainer might have envied.

The spread of his reputation far beyond the limits of Edinburgh brought him a large and steadily increasing private practice but the demands of this were never allowed to encroach upon the time he devoted to his work for the Royal Infirmary and for other voluntary hospitals.

In the 1930’s and early 1940’s he extended his activities to include most of the thoracic surgery in south east Scotland and having, in 1938, been appointed to the charge of wards in the Royal Infirmary, he became one of the first surgeons in Scotland to achieve the successful operative treatment of congenital cardiac disease.

During the Second World War, with many of his younger colleagues away serving with the armed forces, Mercer’s workload was prodigious and covered most of the surgical specialties.

In modern times there can have been few “general” surgeons who more thoroughly deserved that descriptive term but such was his orthopaedic reputation that in 1948 Edinburgh University appointed him to be the first incumbent of the newly established Law Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery.

Until 1951 he continued with his general surgical activities but thereafter devoted himself solely to his professional specialty and to the development of a new Edinburgh academic department of orthopaedics.

He was President of the College from 1951-1956 and there is no doubt that he was one of the greatest holders of this office in modern times. He initiated changes and reforms which led to the transformation of the College from a somewhat introverted institution concerned almost entirely with examinations into a vigorous, innovative centre of higher surgical education with an international influence which has expanded progressively since then.

The 450th anniversary of the College’s foundation occurred during Mercer’s Presidency and he was largely responsible for the planning and organisation of the outstandingly successful celebrations which marked this notable occasion.

He was knighted in 1956 and many other honours and distinctions came to him but none gave him greater satisfaction that the Vice Presidency of the British Orthopaedic Association and the Presidency of the Watsonian Club.

“Wattie” as he was known throughout his life to his friends, colleagues and students was a slightly built, trim figure with a brisk manner and a well-developed dry, pawky sense of humour. He inspired the utmost loyalty and devotion of all who worked for him and many young surgeons whom he trained went on to achieve highly successful careers.

He was a keen curler and golfer, a skilled fisherman and an excellent shot but the sport at which, in his younger days, he excelled was tennis. He was a serious philatelist with a valuable stamp collection built up over many years and also a recognised authority on Scottish postal history to which, following his retirement in 1958, he devoted much of his time right up to his death in 1971.

Wattie Mercer earned his place in Scottish surgical history and the fame that he enjoyed during his lifetime through the highest technical virtuosity but he was also a caring, compassionate doctor with the gift of inspiring his patients with total confidence and they held him in the same high regard as did his colleagues and students. His name will be long remembered in the Edinburgh Medical School and by the College for which, as its President, he did so much.