Andrew Rae Gilchrist

Biography

Andrew Rae Gilchrist was born on 7 July 1899 in Northern Ireland, although his early education was in Edinburgh. He attended the University of Edinburgh from 1917 to 1921 where he obtained his qualifications in medicine. Gilchrist became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1929 at the age of thirty. He received a gold medal for his MD thesis in 1933.

Gilchrist held a number of junior hospital posts; Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, East London Hospital for Children, neurology training in Queen’s Square, London and Rockefeller University Hospital, New York. He returned to Edinburgh where, as fate would have it, four senior physicians died of pneumonia. At the age of thirty-one, Gilchrist was appointed to the consultant staff of the Royal Infirmary. Cardiology was a new specialty in this period and his early appointment lent him to a lifelong interest in heart disease.

Gilchrist became an expert in electrocardiography and became an international authority on heart block. He is known as the founder of cardiology in Scotland. Gilchrist influenced the learning and clinical judgement of medical students for more than thirty years. He was a founder member of the British Heart Foundation. He retired in 1964 after a major coronary thrombosis, but survived another thirty years. Gilchrist was married twice, first in 1931 and second in 1975. Gilchrist was the longest surviving fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and was made and Honorary Fellow in 1990. He died in his home in Edinburgh on 1 March 1995.