Dr Mark Mortimer Crosse MA MB BChir MRCS LRCP FRCA

Mark Crosse was a Consultant Anaesthetist in Southampton from 1973 to 2007, where he was Chairman of the Shackleton Department of Anaesthesia from 1990 to 1995. He is perhaps best remembered for his legendarily tough and thorough novice training programme, which he started with John Edwards in the mid-1970s and ran for 30 years.

Mark was born on the 8^th January 1939 in Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, second of four sons of Captain (later Brigadier) John Crosse, an army doctor, and Olive née Dodwell. They spent most of the war years living in North Wales – an area Mark loved and to which he returned regularly throughout his life. Near the end of the war, the family moved to London, where he later went to Westminster School. Here he played football for the 1st XI, was house captain, and was a keen member of the Air Force cadets. Indeed, he had planned to enter the RAF, but turned down an RAF Flying Scholarship and, following in his father’s footsteps, instead read medicine at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He was not studious and had to resit many exams; rather, he filled his time by flying with Cambridge University Air Squadron (still thinking he would drop medicine and enter the military) and playing table tennis for Cambridge. But ultimately he decided against an air force career, and he completed his clinical training at Bart’s, before completing his house jobs in and around London.

Mark loved anaesthesia – it suited his pilot’s mentality. He started his anaesthetics training at St George’s, before returning to Bart’s. He was a registrar at The Westminster Hospital, where he worked with eminent consultants including Cyril Scurr and Sir Geoffrey Organe. Early mentors included Ivor Slee and Peter McCormick at St George’s (the latter’s daughter was later one of Mark’s anaesthetic trainees), and Ian Jackson at Bart’s (whose son was the priest who took Mark’s funeral and memorial services). After a stint in Stockholm, he rotated from The Westminster to Southampton, where, after getting on well with Douglas Pearce (one of the senior consultants in Southampton), he was encouraged to apply for a consultant post, which he took up in 1973. Officially, his subspecialties were vascular and paediatric anaesthesia (for which he had spent a short time training at the Alder Hey), but his work covered a full range of specialties, particularly general surgery, ENT and urology. Mark and consultant urologist Chris Smart made a particularly formidable (and entertaining) team.

He will be best remembered as a distinguished trainer of anaesthetists. When he arrived in Southampton, there was minimal formal training for new anaesthetic SHOs – and it was apparent that widely varying practices among the senior consultants of the time made learning very difficult for the novices. He and John Edwards, another young consultant, decided to take on all the novice training themselves and to teach in a one-to-one manner to provide a consistent approach. They designed a rigorous, structured 12-week programme for new anaesthetists before they were allowed on the full SHO rota – which is normal now, but in the 1970s was many years ahead of its time. Former trainees remember it as a tough introduction, while acknowledging it as some of the best teaching they ever received. He found out quickly who was not doing their machine checks by discretely sabotaging anaesthetic machines in the morning and watching to see if his trainee found the fault.

He had very high standards in matters of patient care, which he applied to himself and expected of his trainees – and this could make him quite intimidating to juniors. This was tempered by his good humour, enthusiasm, genuine interest in people, and his reassurances that things would be ‘a piece of cake, old boy!’ – one of his many characteristic phrases (easy intubations were sometimes documented as ‘POCOB’). Trainees recognised the huge amount of time and support he gave them – some doctors from abroad even spent Christmas with Mark and family when he realised they would otherwise be alone. Mark derived great satisfaction from watching the careers of his juniors progress. Messages from former trainees describe him as respected, loved, inspirational, a great mentor and a ‘legend’.

As department chairman, he became adept at resisting adverse plans from hospital management (notably managing to retain on-call rooms for juniors despite these no longer being deemed necessary with shift patterns of work). He fostered links with other anaesthetic departments for registrar rotations (which he organised) – including running a rotation to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, which is still going strong today. He designed a department tie, which featured rotameter bobbins and The Mayflower ship (representing Southampton) in alternate stripes. He believed strongly in the social life of the department and would host a summer party at his home, ably supported by his wife, Kee. There was also a Christmas show, where consultants would send themselves up. Mark enjoyed delivering a number of spoof Chairman’s speeches, and once he appeared in a take-off of Macbeth, with a tartan rug for a kilt and a sporran which was in fact a loo roll dispenser (which he had unscrewed from the bathroom wall at home).

Other activities included co-authoring a chapter on vascular surgery (with Tony Chant and Paul Spargo) in The Ageing Surgical Patient (1992), and he was also an anaesthetic advisor on one of the early NCEPOD reports. Towards the end of his career he was developing a modified breathing circuit, which would have allowed rapid changes in anaesthetic gas concentration with comparatively low gas flows. He was encouraged by Bill Mapleson, the expert in breathing systems, but ultimately Mark did not pursue this and nothing came of his designs (the only legacy being a box full of tubing in his study at home). In recognition of his commitment to the specialty and to teaching, the Association of Anaesthetists awarded him the 2002 Evelyn Baker Medal – their award for outstanding competence in all areas of anaesthetic practice.

He rescued a lot of vintage anaesthetic equipment from a skip when the department museum was shut due to lack of space. Much of this was then donated to the anaesthetic department museum in Portsmouth, although old vaporisers were to be found used as doorstops round his house. Visitors to his home would also find a 1960s anaesthetic machine in the hallway (tastefully decorated with plants by Kee), which he had recovered from the dental surgery where he had once delivered general anaesthetics.

Outside work, he was utterly committed to his family. At St George’s, Mark had met Suan Kee Kan, a theatre nurse. They married in 1976 and had two children (one of whom is an anaesthetic trainee, the other a university lecturer in physics). He enjoyed walking in North Wales, and maintained an interest in the military and aviation. There were many holidays in his battered yellow campervan, which he also drove in to work for many years. He was once asked to remove the van from the consultants’ car park by someone who could not believe a consultant would drive such a vehicle.

For someone so motivated by his work and sense of duty to patients and colleagues, retirement was always going to be difficult, but sadly he soon also started showing signs of dementia. Nevertheless, he took great pleasure in spending time with his grandchildren, and he managed to live a fairly independent life until his final illness – he was still walking a mile each day on his own a week before he was admitted to hospital. Mark will be remembered as a great character, who was always ready with an amusing (and often educational) anecdote, a great mentor, and a meticulous anaesthetist who dedicated himself to his work. He died on the 14^th May 2023. He is survived by his wife, Kee, by his two children, Alexander and David, and by two grandchildren.

David Crosse and Paul Spargo

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to John Edwards for providing information.

A version of this obituary appears in the February 2024 edition of Anaesthesia News, published by the Association of Anaesthetists.