John J. Wild, 95; researcher advanced medical uses of ultrasound

Dr. Wild’s work formed a foundation for modern ultrasonic scanners, which can be found in most clinics where breast cancer screening is done. Although he worked with a team and there were other scientists engaged in similar research, Dr. Wild alone was named the 1991 winner of the Japan Prize, a world-renowned science award given by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan.

The path to his breakthrough discovery started during World War II. Dr. Wild, then a surgeon at Miller General Hospital in Kent, was interested in treating bowel bloating, an often fatal condition suffered by British residents in shock from German buzz bomb blasts. An inveterate tinker, he had already created an instrument dubbed the Wild tube to treat the condition, but he continued to look for a better solution.

Dr. Wild moved to the University of Minnesota after the war and began trying to measure the thickness of bowel walls. He first used a machine designed to find stress fractures in tanks, then acquired a radar simulator used to train airmen to read maps, equipment that had been lying unused at a local naval air base.

His 1949 discovery was a coincidence, said John M. Reid, an electrical engineer who helped Dr. Wild build the first clinical ultrasonic scanner. “The first [tissue] sample had a bit of cancer in it, and he could see it in the ultrasound picture better than he could otherwise,’’ Reid said.

Sonic energy, Dr. Wild realized, was reflected as echoes from soft tissues, allowing doctors to spot tumors. It was a groundbreaking discovery, but one that was not immediately recognized by the establishment.

“We were making pictures with sound waves, and everybody knows you listen to sound waves,’’ Reid said.

Dr. Wild and Reid built an instrument in 1953 that produced a real-time image of cancer in a breast. Subsequently, they began finding more tumors, branched out into other parts of the body, and diagnosed a brain tumor later confirmed by surgery.

John Julian Cuttance Wild was born in Bedford Park, a London suburb. He ran away from boarding school at 8 and managed to live in a tree for a week, a family member said.

At 14, he became dissatisfied with the balance of hot and cold water in his bathtub and invented an automatic valve that did the job to his satisfaction, resulting in his first patent. Later, during the gasoline shortage of World War II, he reengineered a 1921 Harley-Davidson motorcycle and sidecar so that it would run on gas from plentiful charcoal.

He graduated from Downing College, Cambridge University, in 1933 and received a master’s degree there in 1940 and the equivalent of a medical degree in 1942. While working at the Kent hospital, he was buried for hours in rubble after a V-1 rocket exploded nearby. He emerged unscathed.

In 1944, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, treating hundreds of British and US soldiers for venereal disease, he said on his website.

He worked at the University of Minnesota from the late 1940s until 1953, leaving to run a medical-technological research unit at the Minnesota Foundation. After it was closed in 1960 over his objections, he became director of another research institute in Minneapolis. Since 1966, he also worked as a doctor in private practice and continued to research ultrasonic scanning under federal grants.

In 1972, Dr. Wild won a $16.3 million award from a Hennepin County, Minn., jury over a claim of defamation and breach of contract after the Minnesota Foundation and Amherst H. Wilder Foundation closed his laboratory. At the time, the Guinness Book of Records called it the world’s largest defamation judgment. There were appeals, and the suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount in 1981.

“He was an eccentric chap,’’ said Peter N.T. Wells, editor emeritus of the journal Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, who was on Dr. Wild’s doctoral committee at Cambridge. “He was a bit secretive about his work.’’

Dr. Wild resisted being managed by anyone else and didn’t suffer gladly those who didn’t see the benefits of interdisciplinary teams in medical research, his family said.

“I think I must have come into this world with a propensity for making chaos out of order, since I always seem to be upsetting those concerned with maintaining conventional levels of orderliness and humbleness,’’ he once said.