W. (Wilfred) Trotter

Born in Gloucestershire in 1872, Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter became an English surgeon and a pioneer of neurosurgery. He trained in medicine at University College London and built a major career at University College Hospital, where he became especially known for work on the nervous system and for advances in head and neck surgery.

Outside the operating room, he reached a wider audience through his writing on social behavior. His best-known book, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916), helped popularize the idea of the “herd instinct” and made him an important early voice in crowd psychology and group behavior.

Trotter was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and later served as professor of surgery at University College Hospital. He died in 1939, remembered both as a gifted surgeon and as a thoughtful writer whose ideas traveled far beyond medicine.