Geoffrey Wooler

He spent most of his working life in the front line, initially as a Royal Army Medical Corps surgeon immediately behind the battlefront after landing in Algeria with the First Army in November, 1942.

He then took part in the invasions of Pantelleria, Sicily and mainland Italy, operating on men wounded in a series of battles, including Monte Cassino, where he set up a field hospital in "Inferno Valley". When he was demobilised in 1946 he was a Lt-Col and had been Mentioned in Despatches.

After the war, he occupied a different kind of front line, as one of the foremost surgeons seeking remedies for heart disease. His advances at Leeds, where he became Consultant Cardio-Thoracic Surgeon, earned him a place in the pantheon of leaders in this challenging field. In 1957 he spearheaded one of the world's greatest surgical advances, when his team performed a successful open-heart operation, the repair of a mitral valve.

His contribution has been recognised by his admiring peers. When William S Stoney, Emeritus Professor of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA, published his authoritative Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery in 2008 he included an account of Mr Wooler's career, and added a dedication to a presentation copy: "For Geoffrey Wooler FRCS – thank you for being my mentor and inspiration to pursue a life doing cardiac surgery."

Geoffrey Wooler's wonderful ability for making friends was exercised freely among his fellow surgeons. They termed themselves the Wooler Society, meeting from time to time at his country home at West Burton, Wensleydale. Some sent him pupils for training, and those young men now occupy important surgical posts throughout the world. In 1989 the Wooler Society put up a plaque commemorating his work at the entrance to the Infirmary.

One associate was Marian Ion Ionescu, who escaped from Ceausescu's Romania, and, welcomed and encouraged by Mr Wooler, settled in Leeds, where he too became a distinguished surgeon, and a generous benefactor to medicine in the city. He calls his old mentor a great and generous gentleman, surgeon, innovator and teacher, and a distinguished pioneer in the field of heart and lung surgery.

These tributes, and many others from colleagues and patients who owe their lives to his skill, demonstrate how Mr Wooler, in a long and distinguished life, dedicated himself to the service of others and won hearts as well as repaired them. He surely has a place among the Yorkshire greats.

Another of those greats, Bob Appleyard, the cricketer, was a patient of his when, in 1952, the year after he had taken 200 first-class wickets in his first full season, he succumbed to tuberculosis. Mr Wooler carried out a life-saving operation, and the two men became close friends.

Geoffrey Wooler was born on November 24, 1911, into a well-to-do Leeds family. His grandfather set up as a sanitary engineer in the 19th century, and Mr Wooler's father developed the business. Their horse-drawn carts, and later their lorries and vans, were emblazoned with the claim "We Test Drains" in letters so large they resembled mobile billboards. Mr Wooler attributed his family's fortune to the success of this slogan, and the excellence of the firm's work in subterranean Leeds.

He had an elder brother, Edwin John Loy Wooler, who was Lord Mayor of Leeds in 1963, and a younger sister, Joyce. His mother was blind, and he was cared for by a nursemaid who taught him to knit and crochet, which proved invaluable in his professional life.

He was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Giggleswick School. After reading medicine at Cambridge University, he began clinical work at the London Hospital. Called up in 1939, he went to North Africa with the 70th General Hospital, and began three years of front-line surgery during which he operated on some 3,000 men wounded in battle.

He returned to Leeds in 1947 at the invitation of the distinguished surgeon Philip Allinson, taking up a consultancy in the department of thoracic surgery at the General Infirmary. He was friendly with Denis Melrose, who was developing a heart-lung machine at the Hammersmith Hospital. The Nuffield Foundation funded three prototypes, one of which was allocated to Mr Wooler at Leeds.

There followed a long period of experimentation, but eventually Mr Wooler and his team felt sufficiently confident to start operating on humans. Their success in making the heart accessible to surgery aroused international interest. Pig valves were used, and it was not unknown for Mr Wooler to collect fresh supplies from a Leeds abattoir in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce

Their work was publicised locally by Frank Laws, a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post, and nationally in 1958, when BBC TV screened Your Life in their Hands from the General Infirmary, and included a demonstration of the heart-lung machine, and an interview with a woman who had undergone a successful operation the previous year.

Mr Wooler retired from the National Health Service in 1974. Subsequently he opened a restaurant in Headingley, Leeds, an adventure that he recorded in his wonderfully anecdotal biography Pig in a Suitcase (Smith Settle, 1999) under the heading "How Not to Run a Restaurant". The premises are now devoted to Thai cuisine, and Mr Wooler, who spent his later years in the house next door, was in the habit of entertaining his many friends there, occasions full of fun, good conversation, gossip and enlightenment.