My father, Archie Norman, who has died aged 104, was an eminent paediatrician who pioneered research into cystic fibrosis and asthma at Great Ormond Street hospital, in London, and neonatal care at Queen Charlotte’s.
The son of George Norman, a radiologist, and his wife, Mary (nee MacCallum), a nurse, he was born in Oban, Argyll and Bute, and watched his father march off to the first world war. He grew up in the soot-covered mill town of Shaw in Lancashire (now part of Greater Manchester), and remembered the “waker” coming down the street and the sirens summoning workers to the morning shift.
After attending Charterhouse school, in Godalming, Surrey, he studied medicine at Cambridge University, taking psychology as a postgraduate and then went to the Middlesex hospital. He served as a house registrar at Great Ormond Street before the second world war when there were few antibiotics and no NHS. At his weekly whooping cough clinic distressed mothers with children queued around the block to be given coloured pills depending on their ability to pay.
During the war he was assigned as medical officer to the 4th battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers, a reconnaissance unit sent to North Africa in early 1942. At the battle of Knightsbridge he was left behind in the retreat tending the wounded and sending away his last vehicle to safety. He served in PoW camps in Italy and Silesia before being liberated by the Russians. He led 150 troops to freedom, marching on foot for weeks through Russian lines and then by train to the Black Sea. On their commendation he was appointed MBE in 1945. “They had an exaggerated idea of what I did,” he said.
Returning to Great Ormond Street, he arrived in an extraordinary new era for paediatrics. He founded the hospital’s respiratory clinic to pioneer research and treatment of cystic fibrosis and asthma. He undertook the first UK life tables for cystic fibrosis, which showed that in the early 1950s few children reached teenage years. Asthma was a significant cause of child mortality in smog-filled London and he raised money to pay for new lung function tests and pioneered the use of steroids to treat children.
As the numbers of patients grew, he organised the founding of the Cystic Fibrosis Research Trust, cajoling parents and benefactors into getting it off the ground. Later he was a driving force behind the founding of the Children’s Trust at Tadworth, Surrey, as a centre for helping children with brain injury.
In 1953 he became consultant paediatrician at Queen Charlotte’s, where he worked on groundbreaking care of premature babies. He looked after the first quintuplets born in the UK, in 1969. At night he would dash up to London from the family home in Kingswood, Surrey, to do an emergency transfusion, driving home afterwards “feeling that I had done something worthwhile”.
He worked long hours and lived for his patients until he retired to spend more time with his wife, Betty, a GP. He never sought recognition and disdained bombast. He always wore a clean white coat on the ward and walked up the stairs even if the lift was available. He drank little and settled for a cheese sandwich for lunch.
He is survived by Betty and their five sons, Duncan, Thomas, Sandy, Donald and me, and by seven grandchildren.
Archie Norman obituary
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