Douglas Gairdner: Difference between revisions

  |url=

  |accessdate=

Gairdner attended Kelvinside Academy, Glasgow; Dragon School, Oxford; and Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk.<ref name="obit"/> He went to school with W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten and sang madrigals with classmate Peter Pears.<ref name="obit"/>

He read chemistry at the {{UNI|University of Oxford|Oxon}} but switched to medicine, did clinical training at Middlesex Hospital and was awarded his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery Degree in 1936.<ref name="obit"/> He did his residency (house physician) in paediatrics at The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street in Bloomsbury, London in 1937-8.<ref name="obit"/><ref name="spence"/> Gairdner described his experience there in a memoir written a half-century later. He wrote, "I recall the sheer enjoyment of working there, but also the periods of overwhelming exhaustion."<ref>{{REFjournal

Gairdner worked as a fellow in paediatrics at Bellevue Hospital in 1939.<ref name="obit"/> During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps for five years, retiring with the rank of Major.<ref name="obit"/><ref name="spence"/>

He became first assistant in the paediatric department at Newcastle upon Tyne where he began to work under Professor Sir James Calvert Spence in 1945.<ref name="spence"/> In 1948, he became a consultant paediatrician at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, and associate lecturer in paediatrics at the {{UNI|University of Cambridge|UCam}}, where he remained until his retirement in 1975.<ref name="spence"/>

}}</ref> Gairdner was pleased with the success of the article.<ref name="obit" />