Douglas Gairdner: Difference between revisions

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'''Douglas Montagu Temple Gairdner''', FRCP (19 November 1910 – 10 May 1992) was a Scottish paediatrician, research scientist, academic and author. Gairdner was principally known for a number of research studies in neonatology at a time when that subject was being developed as perhaps the most rewarding application of basic physiology to patient care, and later his most important contributions as editor, firstly editing ''Recent Advances in Paediatrics'' and then of ''Archives of Disease in Childhood'' for 15 years, turning the latter into an international journal of repute with its exemplary standards of content and presentation.<ref>{{REFjournal

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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 University of Oxford 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

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Gairdner worked as a fellow in paediatrics at Bellevue Hospital in 1939.<ref name="obit"/> During the Second World War, 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 University of Cambridge, where he remained until his retirement in 1975.<ref name="spence"/>

 

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Gairdner's 1949 article, ''The Fate of the Foreskin: A Study of Circumcision'',<ref name="fate">{{REFjournal

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}}</ref> was described as "a model of perceptive and pungent writing."<ref name="spence" /> It concluded that if circumcision became uncommon it would result in "the saving of about 16 children's lives lost from circumcision each year in this country..."<ref name="fate"/> According to Wallerstein, the article "began to affect the practice of circumcision by the British".<ref>{{REFjournal

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}}</ref> Gairdner was pleased with the success of the article.<ref name="obit" /> Gairdner also opposed unnecessary tonsillectomy, drawing attention to the risks of the operation at the time (1951)<ref>{{REFjournal

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