John McMichael (medic)

Sir John McMichael (born July 25, 1904 in Gatehouse of Fleet, Kirkcudbrightshire , Scotland , † March 4, 1993 in Oxford ) was a British physician ( cardiology ). He was a professor at the University of London .

McMichael studied medicine in Edinburgh and won many prizes as a student, including a gold medal for his dissertation (MD) in 1933 with Stanley Davidson in Aberdeen and Thomas Lewis in London. Until 1931 he was a Royal Society Research Fellow in Edinburgh and dealt with respiratory diseases, then he went to London to the Royal Postgraduate Medical School (at Hammersmith Hospital) and turned to cardiology. He became reader there in 1939 and its director in 1946 as the successor to Francis Fraser . In its day it became a leading center of medical research in the UK. He organized the hospital in the tradition adopted in Scotland from Germany (with a chief physician who checked the bed occupancy and no doctors from outside who could occupy the beds), and initially met with fierce opposition from the London doctors. He promoted talented young scientists and ensured their rapid advancement from an early age. In 1966 he became director of the British Postgraduate Medical Federation . In 1971 he retired.

McMichael was a pioneer of cardiac catheterization in Great Britain , where he encountered resistance similar to that of Werner Forßmann in Germany. It was first published in 1946. André Frédéric Cournand and Dickinson Woodruff Richards received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1956 (with Forßmann) for research in this area in New York . Soon after establishing cardiac catheterization in England, he changed research areas and turned to hypertension and the pharmacology of heart disease (specifically digitalis ).

In 1960 he received the Canada Gairdner International Award . In 1940 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (from 1981 he was an honorary fellow there) and in 1965 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Melbourne. In 1975 he gave the Harvey Lecture . In 1957 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1965 he was knighted and from 1968 to 1972 he was President of the British Cardiac Society . In 1970 he was President of the Fifth World Cardiology Congress in London. In 1974 McMichael was elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

Fonts

• Pharmacology of the failing human heart, Blackwell Scientific Publ., Oxford 1950

Web links

• John F. Goodwin, Sir John McMichael 1903-1993, Profiles in Cardiology, pdf
• Obituary by Colin Dollery, The Independent, March 13, 1993

Individual evidence

1. ^ J. McMichael, S. Howarth, Peter Sharpey-Shafer Cardiac catherization in cases of patient interauricular septum, primary pulmonary hypertension, Fallot's tetrology and pulmonary stenosis , In: British Heart Journal , Volume 9, 1947, pp. 292-296