Sir John Crofton (1912-2009)

One of the world’s most eminent medical doctor’s, died earlier this week in his home city of Edinburgh, Scotland, at the age of 97. Sir John Crofton had a great many notable achievements during his dazzling career but he is perhaps most noted for his pioneering work developing effective treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. He was Professor of Respiratory Diseases and Tuberculosis, University of Edinburgh, 1952-77, and Chairman of the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, 1984-88. Millions of people, from Scotland and the rest of the world, benefitted from his enormous influence in tackling TB. In the 1950s TB was one of the major global public health problems (my grandmother died from it in Scotland when my mother was a child) but nowadays, partly thanks to Sir John Crofton’s work, it is largely controlled across most of the world. Sir John published an interesting account of those pioneering days in a recent paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1592068/?tool=pubmed

His work covered other areas of public health, and as a respiratory doctor he naturally took a great interest in trying to reduce the massive health effects of tobacco smoking. He was a co-founder of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) in the United Kingdom and Scotland, an organization which has made a major impact in reducing smoking in that country.

My own contact with Sir John was brief, but left an impact. In 1994 I was a young clinical psychologist, still fairly early in a career doing research on smoking cessation at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London. I was very surprised to receive a letter, (which appeared to have been typed on an old-fashioned type-writer….quite unusual even at that time) from Sir John Crofton (and Sir Richard Doll, another major figure in global public health), inviting me to write a chapter on smoking cessation for their planned special edition of the British Medical Bulletin on Tobacco and Health. Of course I agreed immediately, and was very impressed by how quickly (and very politely) these two extremely busy scientists turned around my chapter and produced an excellent book on tobacco and health. I believe it has now been translated into other languages and the English version of the chapters is available online: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8746304 .

For a fascinating account of Sir John Crofton’s life and achievements, check out this interesting obituary:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/sir-john-crofton-physician-whose-research-revolutionised-the-treatment-of-tuberculosis-and-lung-disease-1814817.html