Douglas Montagu Temple Gairdner FRCP was a Scottish paediatrician, research scientist, academic and author.
20 Facts About Douglas Gairdner
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Douglas Gairdner's very early life was spent in Egypt where his father was a missionary.
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Douglas Gairdner's father died in 1928, when Douglas Gairdner was 17 years of age.
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Douglas Gairdner attended Kelvinside Academy, Glasgow Dragon School, Oxford; and Gresham's School, Holt.
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Douglas Gairdner went to school with W H Auden and Benjamin Britten and sang madrigals with classmate Peter Pears.
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Douglas Gairdner 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.
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Douglas Gairdner described his experience there in a memoir written a half-century later.
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Douglas Gairdner worked as a fellow in paediatrics at Bellevue Hospital in 1939.
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Douglas Gairdner became first assistant in the paediatric department at Newcastle where he began to work under Professor Sir James Calvert Spence in 1945.
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Douglas Gairdner was appointed editor of the Archives of Disease in Childhood in 1964, a position he held for 15 years, until his retirement in 1979.
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Douglas Gairdner opposed unnecessary tonsillectomy, drawing attention to the risks of the operation at the time and suggested more conservative ways of treating repeated respiratory infections.
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Douglas Gairdner served as editor of Recent Advances in Paediatrics, an annual book publication, for several years from 1954.
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Douglas Gairdner made contributions to the field of neonatology with studies on improving the management of respiratory problems of the newborn.
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Douglas Gairdner received the Dawson Williams Prize of the British Medical Association in 1978 for his creative editing of the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
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Douglas Gairdner lived in a detached house on Rutherford Road in Cambridge.
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Douglas Gairdner was a talented musician who played the ukulele, the flute, and the tuba.
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Douglas Gairdner was a member of the Royston Town Band, a brass band that plays in and around the city of Royston, Hertfordshire.
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Douglas Gairdner was a sailor and kept a boat named the "Merry Thought".
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Douglas Gairdner loved to read and told of his wide-ranging interests in an article published by the British Medical Journal.
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Douglas Gairdner was survived by his wife, Nancy, three daughters, and five grandchildren.