Born in Kirkcaldy, he was educated at George Watson’s College and the University of Edinburgh, graduating MB ChB in 1950. Following a house post in the Professorial Medical Unit at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh he started work towards a PhD on coagulation. This was interrupted by National Service, during which he conducted physiological studies on airmen at the RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine in Farnborough. Returning to Edinburgh, he completed his PhD in 1955 with funding from the MRC and the RCPE. He spent a year researching pneumoconiosis with the National Coal Board. In 1957 he passed the MRCPE examination and moved into public health, to which he devoted the rest of his career.
His first post in public health was academic, in the Department of Public Health and Social Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. His move to the NHS came in 1963. As Deputy Senior and then Senior Administrative Medical Officer at Eastern Regional Hospital Board, he was heavily involved in the planning of Ninewells Hospital. In 1967 he moved to the Scottish Home and Health Department, as Principal Medical Officer for Medical Research and Education. In 1971 he was the Masur Fellow at the American Hospital Association, based in Chicago. His last move was in 1973 to become Chief Administrative Medical Officer at the newly-formed Greater Glasgow Health Board. There he relished the challenge of moulding health services to address the needs of the people of Glasgow. He weathered multiple reorganisations and retired in 1993 as Director of Public Health.
He played a major role in the formation of the Faculty of Community Medicine within the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the UK. He was determined that public health (then known as community medicine) should be on a professional footing equivalent to clinical specialties. In the 1980s he served on the GMC and as an Honorary Physician to the Queen. He was a Visiting Professor in Public Health at the University of Glasgow and, after retirement, an Honorary Professor at the University St Andrews. His OBE in 1993 was for services to healthcare.
He was a calm, pragmatic man, whose preference for the medicine of populations was underlined by his 60-year membership of the Royal Statistical Society. He abhorred smoking, and applied to his own life his conviction that prevention was better than cure, implementing into his 90s the recommendations of major papers on diet and exercise.
In 1957 he married Catherine Cousland, who died in 2013. They had two daughters, one of whom became a consultant physician, and three grandchildren, one of whom is in junior medical training.
Margaret A McMillan