Abstract
Professor Sir Gordon Robson died on 23 February 2007 aged 85. As President of the RSM, he did much to help Dr Carice Ellison and her late husband Dr Percy Cliffe establish their annual Lecture, the first being given during his term. He also encouraged the setting up of the now thriving Section of Clinical, Forensic and Legal Medicine.
He was born in Stirling, and did his medical training in Glasgow. After qualifying in 1944, he was abruptly thrown into the realities of home deliveries in poor households where expensive medical help was often sought too late: this experience ignited his lifelong determination to improve standards of practice. He then joined the RAMC and became a trainee anaesthetist to East Africa Command in Nairobi, where his skills were quickly appreciated by the Army surgeons.
After the war he worked in Glasgow, Newcastle and Edinburgh, and then for eight years as the Wellcome Professor of Anaesthetics at McGill University, Montreal. In 1964, he returned as the first Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anaesthetics at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and Hammersmith Hospital. During his 22-year tenure the standing of the department and its research had the highest acclaim.
Sir Gordon did much on the national scene to improve standards of anaesthesia and patient care. He took an active part in the Faculty of Anaesthetists and was later its Dean. He introduced the inspection of anaesthetics departments for training purposes—having the temerity to remove trainees from a number of well-known departments in London where insufficient supervision was taking place, often because senior staff were absent. In 1979 he led invaluable work on the definition of brain death, which is so important in transplant surgery. The criteria he developed are still used worldwide and almost unaltered today. This work, and his other research interests, led to his long contribution to the RNLI, as Chairman of its Medical and Survival Committee and a Life Vice-President.
In 1984 he became the last doctor to be Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Distinction Awards. He ran this system with scrupulous fairness and care for nine years— the longest since Lord Moran. Very seldom were his judgements—always formed through carefully sought professional opinion and based on strict, if unpublished, criteria—proved wrong.
Gordon Robson received many medical honours, and was the first Anaesthetist to be Vice-President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He was appointed CBE in 1977 and was knighted in 1982. He married his first wife, Dr Martha Kennedy, in 1945. She had a successful medical career, moving workplace with him. She died in 1975. Gordon had a long final illness which he bore with great courage. He used his own expertise to look after himself, and in this was given calm and invaluable support by his second wife, Jenny Kilpatrick, whom he had married in 1984.