Dr. W. Milton Adams, internationally known plastic surgeon whose restless mind and steady hands constantly sought new ways to create beauty from scarred and torn flesh, died at 10:30 a.m. yesterday in Methodist Hospital. Death came to the popular physician despite surgery performed Saturday to alleviate a heart ailment. Dr. Adams, who was 51, had been ill several weeks. Services will be at 3:30 p.m. today at National Funeral Home. The Very Rev. William E. Sanders, dean of St. Mary's Cathedral (Episcopal) and a close friend of Dr. Adams, will officiate. Burial will be in Memorial Park. Described by a close surgeon-friend as "an artist who could look at a scarred face and visualize how it should be." Dr. Adams was surgeon to internationally known celebrities and the indigent alike. "He devoted a day each week to charity work," said the surgeon. His colleagues would come to his clinic at 1073 Madison to observe. He was invited to Europe twice last year to talk before surgical assemblies. Contributing to his stature in the field was his "straightforwardness" in controversial matters among fellow physicians. "One never had to question which side of the fence he was on," said a friend. "If he thought something was wrong he didn't hesitate to say so, no matter whose toes he stepped on." He was a man who enjoyed classical music and astronomy without being "highbrow." He enjoyed occasional jaunts to Horseshoe Lake to fish but gave them up in recent years under the pressure of other matters. He lived at 689 East Drive. A devoted father of four, he once turned his talent with plastics, into the creation of a model train layout which friends said "far surpassed" anything he had ever seen in train shops. Dr. Adams was born in Ripley, Miss., and received his medical degree from Tulane in 1930. He had limited his practice to plastic surgery since 1935. He had been chief of staff at Methodist Hospital and Chief of the department of plastic surgery at John Gaston Hospital, Baptist Hospital, Methodist Hospital, Memphis Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital, St. Joseph Hospital and LeBonheur Children's Hospital. He was head of the plastic surgery department at the University of Tennessee and a consulting plastic surgeon at Kennedy Veterans Hospital. He was Man Of The Year of Kappa Sigma Fraternity in 1945. He was president of the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in 1953-54; founder and director of the Memphis Cleft Lip and Cleft Palate Center; president of the Tennessee Society of Plastic Surgeons in 1955; associate editor of the Journal of the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery for the last three years; chairman of the American Board of Plastic Surgery in 1956-57. He was a Methodist, a Mason, a Rotarian and a member of the Memphis Country Club. He leaves his wife, Mrs. Catherine Taylor Adams; two sons, William Milton Adams Jr. and Robert Franklin Adams of Memphis; two daughters, Ann Taylor Adams and Catherine Sue Adams of Memphis; his mother, Mrs. Robert Milton Adams of Memphis; two brothers, Dr. Lorenzo H. Adams of Memphis and James Herman Adams of Raymond, Miss., and a sister, Mrs. Victoria Adams Shaffner of Memphis. (Published in The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, TN, on April 5, 1957)