William Paton Cleland (30 May 1912 – 29 March 2005) was an Australian born British cardiothoracic surgeon and was one of the early pioneers of open-heart surgery.
He moved to the UK in 1938 with the intention of becoming a physician but his experiences during the war sparked an interest in surgery.
He was further influenced by Tudor Edwards, Lord Russell Claude Brock and Sir Clement Price Thomas.
[4][5] In 1959 the Hammersmith team, with Dennis Melrose's heart-lung machine, Cleland as the lead surgeon and Hugh Bentall as the assistant surgeon, were invited by Alexander Bakulev to the Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery in Moscow where, watched by over 200 surgeons from the Soviet Union, they carried out five open-heart operations leading to the introduction of open-heart surgery to Soviet Russia.
[6][7][8] Anastas Mikoyan, the First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union at the time, congratulated the team saying "Doctors are clean, but politicians are dirty".