Gavin James Brown

Gavin James Brown was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where his father was a pre-National Health Service general practitioner working in a mining community with a heavy clinical workload. Gavin frequently accompanied his father on his medical rounds and decided at an early age that he wished to become a doctor.

He attended preparatory school at Croftinloan in Pitlochry. He was academically bright and keen on sports. The home farm at the school started his lifelong interest in gardening and rural Scotland. In 1961 he won an open scholarship to Repton School, Derbyshire, and became head boy. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and graduated in 1972.

His medical training in Edinburgh developed his academic mind and applied his meticulous personality to clinical practice. His postgraduate training jobs in cardiology and cardiothoracic surgery gave him a lifelong expertise and passion for clinical cardiology. These were groundbreaking days in Edinburgh, with bypass machines, heart pacemakers, and a mobile coronary care unit staffed by the doctors. In those days high technology was a Morris Minor van with the junior doctors’ treating coronary cases at home with not much …