In Memorium

Peter James Witherow

10 March 1935 – 5 January 2020

Obituary by Martin Gargan and Helen Witherow

Mr Peter James Witherow was educated at Epsom College and studied medicine at Birmingham University where he became Chairman of the University Medical Students Society and was awarded University Colours for judo. He qualified in 1958.

After three junior hospital appointments he was called up to do National Service which he chose to do in the Colonial Service in Basutoland for three years. He returned to surgical training in Birmingham and Oswestry where he was seconded for six months to the Rheumatism Foundation Hospital in Heinola, Finland.

He was appointed as successor to Arthur Eyre-Brooke in Bristol in 1973 and took over and developed an extensive single-handed paediatric and young adult orthopaedic and spinal deformity service. He was a firstclass surgical teacher, Head of the Bristol training programme and the Witherow post was always considered one of the ‘must do’ attachments for any trainee in the South-West. He was forward thinking and with radiology colleagues established the first skeletal dysplasia clinic and database in the country, which still largely exists in its original format. The most telling metric of his significant clinical workload is the fact that he has now been replaced by ten paediatric and five spinal deformity surgeons.

In addition to his extensive clinical workload, he was an international leader serving with distinction on the Executive of the European Paediatric Orthopaedic Society, the British Scoliosis Society, the Cerebral Palsy Surgical Society and was President of the British Society for Children’s Orthopaedic Surgery. He had an extensive research interest and published widely, with a particular interest in cerebral palsy. His collaboration with Jane Pyman, MBE, was before its time and he would have been delighted to know that the long-term study of his initial cohort of multilevel surgery patients in cerebral palsy has been published since his death.

Peter was a superb role model for any surgeon. He had a first class brain and was a well-prepared and informed clinician. He was a meticulous and gifted operative surgeon with the calmest of temperaments and thoroughly committed to training. He was a kind and caring doctor who had a profound influence on several generations of children’s Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Outside work Peter had many interests. He became an expert in each and exhibited the same desire for perfection in his hobbies as he did in his work. He was well read and loved music and played the recorder to a very high standard. He loved working with his hands whether it was mending things or developing and printing his black and white photographs, making fibreglass kayaks or his beautiful cabinet making, lovingly crafting toys for his grandchildren. He was a member of the South Wales Potters and became an accomplished ceramicist with a Potter’s wheel and kiln in the garage. His ceramics were highly valued by others but not by himself. His own high standards often ended consigning the pots to the bin, only to be retrieved by his wife. However, occasional pieces were felt to be of a sufficient standard to be exhibited in the South Wales Potters exhibitions.

He developed Parkinson’s disease in 2000 and died on the 5th January 2020 after a protracted illness. He was nursed at home by Pat, his wife, whom he married in 1959. He left two children, Helen, a Maxillofacial surgeon, Tim a classics scholar and four grandchildren who remember him not as an eminent Orthopaedic Surgeon but as the model aeroplane maker, the teacher of making pottery animals and for his kite flying prowess.