Bill Cleland

Developer of open-heart surgery

Bill Cleland was an Australian doctor who specialised in chest medicine and surgery in Britain and then became a leading member of the team that developed open-heart surgery in the late 1950s. He also trained young surgeons from abroad who later became leaders in their own countries. Outside the operating theatre he was very active in promoting his speciality by teaching, writing and lecturing, and was the first Director of Surgery at the then Institute for Diseases of the Chest, in London.

William Paton Cleland, cardiac surgeon: born Sydney, New South Wales 30 May 1912; Consultant Cardio-Thoracic Surgeon, King's College Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital and Brompton Hospital 1948-77; Director, Department of Surgery, Institute for Diseases of the Chest (later Cardio-Thoracic Institute, Brompton Hospital), London 1960-77; Editor, Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery 1978-83; married 1940 Norah Goodhart (died 1994; two sons, one daughter); died Goodworth Clatford, Hampshire 29 March 2005.

Bill Cleland was an Australian doctor who specialised in chest medicine and surgery in Britain and then became a leading member of the team that developed open-heart surgery in the late 1950s. He also trained young surgeons from abroad who later became leaders in their own countries. Outside the operating theatre he was very active in promoting his speciality by teaching, writing and lecturing, and was the first Director of Surgery at the then Institute for Diseases of the Chest, in London.

Cleland was educated in Adelaide, where he qualified as a doctor in 1934, and he went to Britain at the age of 27 to specialise in chest medicine at the Brompton Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, London. But he was told that he would make a good surgeon and so became the resident surgical officer at the hospital. His mother did not approve: "Bill was never any good at carpentry."

After serving in the Emergency Medical Service during the Second World War, Cleland gained consultant appointments as thoracic surgeon to King's College Hospital, the Brompton Hospital and to Hammersmith Hospital at the Postgraduate Medical School of London. This last appointment was to prove the highlight of his surgical career.

Cardiac surgery developed rapidly after 1945 when the first "blue baby" operation was done in America, but all procedures when carried out with an intact beating heart. There was an urgent need to be able to open the heart and fully correct the defects. For this a heart-lung machine was required, which would perform the functions of the heart and lungs, keeping the patient supplied with oxygenated blood while the heart was stopped. Professor Dennis Melrose invented a pump oxygenator at Hammersmith Hospital in 1952. Having seen the apparatus, Professor A.N. Bakulev from Moscow was keen to buy a machine and to start open-heart surgery in the Soviet Union. He invited Melrose to bring the Hammersmith team, with Cleland and Hugh Bentall as the surgeons, to visit Moscow in May 1959.

The Russian doctors selected four patients with congenital heart disease for surgery. Two of them were very blue children with tetralogy of Fallot, a condition that the team had never before operated on. But all four operations were successful; Cleland remarked that God had so little to do in Russia that He was able to give His entire attention to them. This was the first time that a foreign medical team had actually worked in the Soviet Union, as distinct from just being shown round, and they returned on the inaugural flight of the Tupolev 104.

In 1968 an article from Cleland and his colleagues in The Lancet on "A Decade of Open Heart Surgery" gave details of 1,200 operations which showed the safety of using extra corporeal circulation; and he wrote a definitive paper in Thorax in 1983 on "The Evolution of Cardiac Surgery in the United Kingdom".

He was an unhurried, unflappable and meticulous surgeon and the operating theatre was always calm when Bill Cleland was operating. Many surgeons and physicians from Britain and abroad came to Hammersmith to learn these new techniques and Cleland lectured and carried out heart operations in Europe and the Middle East. He wrote chapters on heart surgery for several textbooks and also on surgery of the lung which he continued to practice.

His father, Sir John Cleland, was Professor of Pathology in the University of Adelaide and his untiring work for the natural environment was commemorated in the naming of the Cleland National Park in the Adelaide Hills. Bill Cleland was proud of his ancestry and he became the 26th head of an ancient Scottish family that traces its history back to a cousin of William Wallace of Braveheart fame.

Cleland was a strongly built man with a soft Australian accent. He was warm-hearted, always a pleasure to be with, and a person one felt instinctively could be completely trusted and reliable. He had a very happy married life, though his wife died 10 years before him, and they lived in a 18th-century mill house near Andover in Hampshire with a trout stream running through the property. Fishing was his main hobby and the salmon of the River Spey, Lapland and Iceland were magnets for him. At home he was a keen gardener and beekeeper and he won top prizes in the annual village show at Goodworth Clatford. Second only to fishing was his great love of opera, with Angela Georgiu his favourite diva. His three children are a teacher, a professor of demography and a consultant neurologist.

In his nineties he was physically frail but as alert as ever and he died in his 93rd year comfortably and peacefully at home in his own bed after only a short illness.

Arthur Hollman