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Obituaries

Ian Campbell Roddie

BMJ 2011; 343 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.d6923 (Published 25 October 2011) Cite this as: BMJ 2011;343:d6923
  1. Peter Froggatt,
  2. Mary Roddie,
  3. William Wallace

Ian Campbell Roddie was an innovative physiologist whose classic work on peripheral vascular dynamics and lymphatic circulation is still widely quoted. A lucid and inspirational teacher, he was also a deep thinker on medical education, and his pioneering work on instruction and assessment methods stimulated timely debate and remains relevant. Not least, he was an efficient enabling administrator and a decisive executive.

Ian Roddie was born the third of four medical sons of a local Methodist minister. He entered Queen’s from Methodist College, Belfast, in 1946 graduating MB, BCh, BAO in 1953, having previously taken a BSc in physiology (1950, first class honours). He won the Malcolm exhibition in 1951 and, in 1953, the McQuitty scholarship at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, the major teaching hospital associated with Queen’s. After house appointments at the Royal Victoria he joined Professor David Greenfield’s research team at Queen’s—working with J T Shepherd (later to be chairman of the Mayo Foundation), R F Whelan (later to be vice chancellor of the Universities of Western Australia and then of Liverpool), and W E Glover (later to be dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of New South Wales)—researching the nervous control of peripheral blood vessels, which Greenfield and his predecessor in the Dunville chair, Henry Barcroft, had pioneered. This led to many publications, an MD (with gold medal) in 1957, a Harkness Commonwealth Fund fellowship to the University of Washington in Seattle (1960-1), and a DSc (QUB, 1962) on his return. When he succeeded Greenfield in 1964 he was leading major research into the effect of mental stress and thermoregulation on the peripheral circulation, …

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