CARDIOLOGIST

My route to cardiology was anything but planned. Born in North London in 1930, the older son of an electrical engineer of Scottish descent and a child of the war years, I enjoyed my days at boarding school, which led on to watershed years at Cambridge reading natural sciences. I then switched from a potential botanical career to read medicine and went on to St Thomas’ Hospital for the clinical years—all told, a rich and formative path that embraced friendships, sport, singing, painting, stage, and an appropriate mix of clinical and academic excellence. This flowed fairly seamlessly (after the salutary shock of failing finals!) into a series of junior hospital clinical and research posts in different medical specialties—a luxury of all-round experience sadly no longer practically possible...