Alexander Burns Wallace

Alexander "Alister" Burns Wallace CBE FRSE FRCSE (1906–1974) was a Scottish plastic surgeon. He was a founding member and president (1951) of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons, and the first editor of the British Journal of Plastic Surgery. In authorship he appears as A. B. Wallace.

He was born in Edinburgh in 1906, the son of Alexander Wallace and his wife, Christina Bishop.

Wallace was educated at George Heriot's School and then studied Medicine at Edinburgh University, graduating with his MB ChB in 1929.

He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1932. Following that, he went to McGill University completing a MSc degree in lymphatics research in 1936. During World War II he served as plastic surgeon at the Scottish Emergency Medical Hospital at Bangour (1940–45).

In 1945 he moved to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, and was Reader in Plastic Surgery at Edinburgh University from 1946 until his retirement in 1970.

In 1972 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Douglas Guthrie, Anthony Elliot Ritchie, Neil Campbell, and Sir Edmund Hirst.

In 1973, he was awarded an honorary doctorate (PhD) by the University of St Andrews.

He retired to Ceres in Fife and died there on 14 December 1974, leaving a wife, son and three daughters.

In 1951 Wallace introduced the "Rule of Nines" in an article published in the British medical journal "Lancet":

"For patients over the age of 16 years the 'Rule of Nines' (Wallace 1951) indicates the percentage of TBSA accounted for by various parts of the body. Nine per cent for the head and each arm, 18 per cent each for lower limbs and front and back of the trunk, and 1 per cent for the perineal region... Wallace AB (1951) The exposure treatment of burns. Lancet. 1, 501."

Wallace, A.B. The Treatment of Burns. Lord Horder. Oxford University Press. 1941.

Wallace, A.B. "The History and Evolution of Plastic Surgery." Res Medica: Journal of the Royal Medical Society. 1965.