Roger Bryce-Smith
Authors: Michael Day
Journal: BMJ (2006)

​OneOne of the most revealing moments in the life of Roger Bryce-Smith came in 1978, when at the age of 60, and still very much a star in the Oxford medical firmament, he quit his job to spend more time with his family and his vegetable patch. There were no lingering backwards glances, no subsequent attempts to revive his career. He had achieved all he thought he could in medicine and set out to enjoy the rest of his life at a gentler pace.




Figure 1




The ease with which he was able to slip from leading academic to retired family man belied the remarkable contribution he made to modern anaesthesia during his 35 year career.

He was born in 1918 in Wednesbury, Staffordshire, during the dying days of the Great War. Bryce-Smith's engaging nature and desire to help people led him to medical school. He qualified in Oxford in 1943 and the same year he was tending people in the battlefields of the second world war as a lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

He was demobilised in 1947 at the rank of major with several service medals. But the grim experiences of the field hospitals of northern France were to have a major influence on his life and work.

In particular, the need for better and simpler anaesthesia sparked him to embark on a period of research that led to several advances. In the 1940s, anaesthetics was in its infancy as a medical specialty. Patients were put under with chloroform or ether. Both of these crude treatments were notoriously dangerous. Curare arrived in the postwar years. This muscle relaxant revolutionised anaesthesia by allowing the dose of anaesthetic drugs to be drastically reduced.

But Bryce-Smith was determined to make the administration of anaesthesia still safer, and to that end he devised the Bryce-Smith double lumen endobronchial tube, which achieved individual lung ventilation, making anaesthetising an easier and less risky proposition.

He also worked on the development of two further key devices: an induction unit and a portable suction unit that would allow halothane, the next pharmaceutical milestone in anaesthesia, to be used in developing world settings and in war zones. And remarkably, he administered halothane to himself on around 40 occasions during 1956 to establish patterns of use for the drug.

He was greatly influenced by Professor Sir Robert Macintosh, for whom he became first assistant at Oxford's pioneering Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics in 1948. Bryce-Smith's charm and unflappable nature proved useful skills when tensions arose between the academic and clinical departments.

Bryce-Smith's growing reputation saw him poached temporarily in 1952 by the Western Reserve University in Cleveland in the United States, to help set up its department of anaesthesia.

He was the author of many books and for many years edited the journal Anaesthesia.

In what spare time he had, he loved tending his garden, reserving special attention for the vegetable patch. Equally precious was time spent in the south of France in the family caravan. In the early 1960s the Bryce-Smiths were among the first British families to make the Cote d'Azur their holiday home.

Compared to the grim British diet at the time of boiled vegetables and Spam fritters, the sensual appeal of Mediterranean cuisine was a revelation, and was undoubtedly responsible for turning Bryce-Smith into something of a bon viveur. Back in Oxford, the Bryce-Smiths' discovery of continental cuisine stood them in good stead, as they hosted dinner parties for many of the “great and the good” in medicine from around the world.

By now, Roger had been made the president of the division of anaesthetics at the Royal Academy of Medicine. And then in 1978, at the age of 60 and in good health, he retired, and all his clinical and academic work ceased.

In his diaries, he noted that he had “used every item in the Oxford Museum of Anaesthesia.” And he felt that he was no longer “au-fait with scientific developments” in the emerging age of molecular biology.

A life long advocate of the NHS, he had also become disturbed by what he saw as chronic underfunding, excessive administration, and increasing litigation.

After retirement, he helped to establish the Abbeyfield home for the elderly in the Shropshire town of Bishop's Castle, where he spent the last 18 years of his life.

His humour was evident until the end. The nurses who cared for him during his final short illness reported that he was cracking jokes on the day he died.

He leaves a wife, Peggy, and three children.

Roger Bryce-Smith, former anaesthetist Oxford (b 1918; q Oxford 1943), d 31 March 2006.