Born in 1877 son of the Rev George Wade of Falkirk, he was educated at the Royal High School and University of Edinburgh, qualifying with honours in 1898. Two years later he volunteered for active service in South Africa as civil surgeon with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, being awarded the Queen's medal with four clasps. On his return to Edinburgh he was appointed assistant to Sir William Turner in the Anatomy Department, and on obtaining his Fellowship of the Edinburgh College he was appointed curator of the College Museum. For the next fifty years he served the Edinburgh College in a number of capacities as lecturer, as examiner, as President in 1935-36, as a member of council from 1943 to 1953, and as its representative on the General Medical Council. A member of the consulting staff of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, he was a lecturer in surgery in the school of medicine of the Edinburgh Royal College and was consulting surgeon to the Leith Hospital, retiring in 1939. In the 1914-18 war he served first as a Captain with the Scottish Horse Mounted Brigade Field Ambulance and then as consulting surgeon to Allenby's Egyptian Expeditionary Force, being twice mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Distinguished Service Order. In the war of 1939-45 he acted as consulting surgeon to Bangour EMS Hospital, West Lothian. A member of the BMA for over fifty years, he was vice-president of the Section of Surgery at the annual general meeting in Edinburgh in 1927. A general surgeon, he was particularly interested in urology and between 1919 and 1939 he published thirty-five papers on urological subjects and contributed original observations from his unrivalled experience as a surgical pathologist, particularly with reference to prostatic surgery, genito-urinary tuberculosis and vesical neoplasms. In 1932 he delivered the Ramon Guiteras Lecture to the American Urological Association, and in 1949 the Vicary Lecture on the Barber Surgeons of Edinburgh. He was a lovable, extroverted personality whose hobbies included the growing of rare primulas in the garden of his seventeenth-century mansion-house in Pilmuir, Haddington. He loved travel and was a keen student of literature and verse. In 1924 he married Marjorie only daughter of James William Fraser-Tytler of Woodhouselee, Midlothian, who died in 1929. He died in Edinburgh on 21 February 1955 aged 78.