Wilfred Trotter - Life

Life

Born in Coleford, Gloucestershire in 1872, Trotter moved to London to attend college at age 16. An excellent medical student, he decided to specialise in surgery and was appointed Surgical Registrar at University College Hospital in 1901 and Assistant Surgeon in 1906. He opened his own practice after obtaining his medical degree. He was also a keen writer, with an interest in science and philosophy. In 1908, he published two papers on the subject of herd mentality, which were precursors to his later, more famous, work.

Working at University College Hospital in London as professor of surgery, he held the office of honorary surgeon to King George V from 1928 to 1932. He was also a member of the Council of the Royal Society that conferred their Honorary Membership on Professor Freud, whom he attended after his move to England. Later he was consulted about Freud's terminal cancer, in 1938. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 1931. In the last years of his life, he became professor and director of the surgical unit at UCH and turned to writing on a larger scale.

He died in Blackmoor, Hampshire in 1939. The Collected Papers of Wilfred Trotter, an anthology of his final essays, appeared two years after his death.

Trotter was also the surgeon, at University College London for whom Wilfred Bion worked as a resident in his own medical training, before he famously studied groups and trained as a psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Institute. In her account of Bion's life "The Days of our Years," his wife Francesca writes of the great influence Trotter had on the direction of Bion's work on group relations.

Edward Bernays, author of Propaganda and nephew to Freud, also refers to Trotter and Gustave Le Bon in his writings.

He met Sigmund Freud several times. According to Ernest Jones (Freud's first biographer), "he was one of the first two or three in England to appreciate the significance of Freud's work, which I came to know through him. He was one of the rapidly diminishing group who attended the first International Congress at Salzburg in 1908".