Who’s Who in Orthopedics strengthened by his knowledge of medicine in general, of medical administration, of public affairs and by his ability to assess the characters of other men. Ellis was, above all, a wise man and he possessed the urbanity and detachment that would have made him a good judge or colonial governor. Yet these qualities were not such as to attract the attention of the crowd or even of the profession at large. He was not a brilliant inno- vator or a popular orator, and his talents were con- cealed by a natural reserve that could be a little forbidding. His comments on men and affairs were terse and sometimes epigrammatic. Those who knew him well instinctively sought his opinion, and even his verdict, not only on clini- cal problems but on difficult matters of adminis- tration. It was natural that he found himself on the governing bodies of both of his teaching hospitals and he was chairman of the Medical Committee of the Royal National Orthopedic Hospital and of the Academic Board of the Institute of Orthope- dics. His colleagues in the Institute had particular reason to be grateful to him; a young postgradu- ate school is very vulnerable to the influence of reaction on the one hand and unbalanced enthu- siasm on the other. Ellis disliked both, and he used the great weight of his authority to keep the course steady and the pace even. When he spoke as treasurer of the British Orthopedic Association, he was no tame book-keeper but a maker of policy. He would have been one of the associa- tion’s greatest presidents. He had already served with distinction as president of the Orthopedic Section of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Ellis was wholly free from self-importance and it seems never to have occurred to him to seek his own advancement; his thoughts were for
the benefit of his patients and of any organiza- tion with which he was connected. His private life was distinguished by simplicity and content- ment. He was devoted to his wife and two chil- dren and there was a quiet elegance about their charming house in a pleasant backwater of Paddington. It was furnished with perfect taste;
there were even tapestries that Ellis himself had worked in his odd moments of leisure. The garden was his particular delight and he would invite the visitor to inspect his 15 varieties of lily, though his descriptions of their characteristics were always punctuated by powerful impreca- tions against his only enemies—the stray cats of Paddington.
Three of his activities as a surgeon are partic- ularly noteworthy. In 1937, he and B.H. Burns,
95Valentine Herbert ELLIS
1901–1953
Valentine Herbert Ellis was born in India on February 24, 1901, and was the son of Major- General Philip Ellis of the Army Medical Service.
He was educated at Wellington, Clare College, Cambridge, and St. George’s Hospital. He gradu- ated in 1925, became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1928 and at about that time turned his attention to orthope- dics. He became a surgical registrar at the Royal National Orthopedic Hospital, was appointed assistant surgeon in 1931 and served the hospital faithfully until he died. In 1932, Ellis became the first orthopedic surgeon at St. Mary’s Hospital.
No happier choice could have been made. He was
no narrow-minded specialist, and it was fitting
that the first and moving tribute paid to his
memory came from his friend and colleague,
George Pickering, the Professor of Medicine. It
was the breadth of his interests that made Ellis
such a remarkable person. Few orthopedic sur-
geons nowadays can claim to have a proper
knowledge of every aspect of their work, but Ellis
could and this invested his opinions with unusual
value. He was very well read and by means of
other appointments, as at Lord Mayor Treloar’s
Hospital, Alton, and at the Heatherwood Hospi-
tal, Ascot, he accumulated a vast and varied expe-
rience. His versatility was reflected in the papers
he wrote; they were not numerous, just over 20,
but each dealt with some important aspect of a
different problem. He was never repetitious. This
all-round competence in orthopedics was
Who’s Who in Orthopedics
his closest friend since they were undergraduates together, wrote Recent Advances in Orthopedic
Surgery, an exceptionally valuable book thatshould have gone into further editions; it revealed the breadth of the authors’ interests. During the war, Ellis was posted to the emergency hospital at Park Prewett in Hampshire, where he worked with unremitting devotion. In 1945, he and Innes published a short but significant paper on “Battle Casualties Treated by Penicillin,” based on a study of no less than 15,000 cases. A quotation from this paper reveals his sanity at a time when there was much uncritical enthusiasm: “Penicillin has made no difference to the paramount impor- tance of early and adequate surgery; it has, in addition, produced new difficulties in that the effect of penicillin on contaminated wounds obscures the extent of the infection of the tissues, and makes it difficult to judge how radical surgery should be.” Lastly there was Ellis’s growing inter- est in disorders of the shoulder joint; he studied these puzzling conditions with patience and care, his employment of arthrography proved of immense value in the elucidation of injuries of the rotator cuff, and his published papers give some indication of what might have been expected from him, had he lived longer.
On the morning of Tuesday, September 15, 1953, V.H. Ellis had just seen the last patient at his fracture clinic at St. Mary’s Hospital when he suddenly collapsed and died. He was only 52.
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