Frederick Leonard Richardson

Frederick Leonard Richardson

Former associate professor of paediatrics Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, Maryland, United States (b 1926; q Birmingham 1950; MD, FRCP, FRACP), died in an automobile accident on 5 March 2004 while being trained to drive a vehicle with handicap controls.

Fred was one of a group of medical students at Birmingham who contracted poliomyelitis in their final year. He was severely handicapped and qualified a year later than his contemporaries. After studying paediatrics at Oxford and Great Ormond Street he obtained an appointment at Johns Hopkins in 1957, where his interest in handicapped children developed further. Ten years later he obtained the funding for, and was appointed the first director of, the John F Kennedy Institute for the Rehabilitation of Children in Baltimore, which later became the Kennedy-Krieger Institute. Later he obtained the funding for, and became the first director of, the Mailman Centre for Childhood Development in the University of Miami. He held posts at Yale University and in Sydney, Australia, and worked in many third world countries. He worked with missionary zeal for disabled children and had an extraordinary ability to empathise with them. He leaves his second wife, Virginia; two children; two step-children; and six grandchildren. [Michael Drury]