Ian B Pearson

Ian B Pearson started his career in Sheffield in the 1950s with junior hospital posts in paediatrics, medicine, surgery, and obstetrics, then general practice—where he recalled his introduction to two huge drums: one of red pills, one of blue pills. If a patient presented with pain, he was to give them one week’s supply of red pills. If they came back, he should give them one week’s supply of blue pills. What was in the pills? Aspirin. Identical.

Through the 1960s Ian was a Wellcome Trust research fellow in the department of pharmacology and therapeutics at Sheffield University, then a registrar in psychiatry at …