Dr Mary Elizabeth Catto
Orthopaedic pathologist Born: September 11, 1924; Died: July 15, 2014
MARY Catto, who has died aged 89, was a leading orthopaedic pathologist who, as lecturer and reader at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow, made important contributions to the study of avascular necrosis of bone, a crippling condition affecting especially the hips, shoulders and knees.
She was born and brought up in London by her father, who had been a tea planter in Assam, and mother, a Glasgow University economics graduate. Evacuated during the blitz, she came to Glasgow to study medicine and graduated in 1949.
She did her house jobs at the Southern General Hospital in the city and Killearn Hospital, where she was House Surgeon with Professor Roland Barnes. He had been her hero since she first met him as a student in 1946.
Perhaps, had she been a member of a later generation of female medical graduates, she would have pursued a career in orthopaedic surgery itself, but instead she joined Professor DF Cappell’s pathology department at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow in 1951.
A teaching visit to Glasgow in 1953 by Dr Henry Jaffe from New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery served to encourage her decision to specialise in orthopaedic pathology. To further her experience, she was seconded from September 1955 to January 1958 to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London under the supervision of Dr (later Professor) Hubert Sissons, a leader in the field of orthopaedic pathology.
Despite the professional attractions of staying at RNOH, she returned to the department at the Western and was appointed to a newly founded lectureship in orthopaedic pathology in October 1959. She spent the rest of her career in the department being promoted in turn to senior lecturer and then reader.
She made important original contributions to the study of avascular necrosis of bone,which formed the subject of her MD thesis and a series of papers in 1965. She collaborated with her radiology colleague Dr JK Davidson in studies on patients who developed this condition while working in compressed air during the construction of the Clyde Tunnel in the 1960s.
Increasingly, her clinical interest focused on the diagnosis of bone and soft tissue tumours, and she worked closely with Roland Barnes in an early demonstration of the importance of the multidisciplinary team now accepted as the norm in most areas of oncology.
Together they established the Scottish Bone Tumour Registry in 1962 supported by the British Empire Cancer Campaign. This gathered invaluable clinical and pathological data; its quarterly meetings were attended by colleagues from several disciplines from hospitals throughout Scotland and did much to raise standards in diagnosis and treatment of these rare tumours which often affect the young.
Building on this resource, Barnes and Catto combined to write one of the classic papers on bone tumours, Chondrosarcoma of Bone, published in 1966. When Professor Barnes retired in 1972, Dr Catto established similarly close relationships with his successor David Hamblen.
Throughout her career she provided an invaluable source of clinical advice to her colleagues in orthopaedic surgery in the management of difficult bone tumours. She was able to do this from an encyclopaedic knowledge of treatment outcomes gleaned from the meticulous long term follow-up of the records in the registry.
By this time, Dr Catto was one of the leading orthopaedic pathologists in the UK and her membership of the International Skeletal Society was an indication of her renown beyond the UK. She chaired the MRC Soft Tissue Sarcoma Panel.
In addition to her clinical duties, she was a member of the University of Glasgow Medical Faculty Admissions Committee for many years. She was also nurtured young doctors in her somewhat arcane subspeciality, always emphasising the importance of clinicoradiological-pathological correlation.
Following the example of Roland Barnes, she taught on cases in which she had difficulty rather than those she had diagnosed with ease. She fostered her students too in a social sense, intro- ducing very many to Scottish Opera, one of the great passions of her life, and dining out.
Visitors to the department from abroad (and in that time there were very strong links with, for example Hong Kong and Jordan) were taken care of, often living in her home.
She was in effect the mother figure of the department.
She retired in 1989, but maintained her interest in orthopaedic pathology until her mid-eighties when ill health took its toll. She died peacefully at home on 15 July 2014.
She never married, but she leaves a wide circle of friends and many grateful pathologists and orthopaedic surgeons who benefitted from her teaching and generosity.