Ogilvie of the Ogilvie Syndrome

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• William Heneage Ogilvie, MD

William Heneage Ogilvie (1887–1971) was born in Valparaiso, Chile, the son of a Scottish engineer then working in South America. At New College, Oxford, he earned first-class honors in physiology, then enrolled as a medical student at Guy's Hospital in London. He qualified as a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1920. Serving with distinction as a medical officer in World Wars I and II, he rose to the rank of major-general. For his distinguished service to the crown, he was dubbed Sir Heneage in 1946. Among his valued contributions to military medicine was his insistence that colostomy should be performed in all instances of wounds involving the colon. In 1948, he published an account of pseudo-obstruction of the colon attributed to disturbed autonomic innervation in the absence of any stenotic lesion (Brit Med J 194;2:671–673). Among his many awards was honorary fellowship in the American College of Surgeons. An elegant and prolific writer, he was given to composing aphorisms; among them: “A perpetually idle man gets nowhere; a perpetually busy man gets not much further,” and “What is recent is not necessarily an advance; an advance is not necessarily recent.”