Colin Dollery: clinical pharmacologist and moderniser, who embraced technology

Colin Dollery, professor of clinical pharmacology and medicine and consultant clinical pharmacologist, who has died aged 89, endured “a dark night of the soul” before defying his father’s wishes to study medicine but was disdainful of the bowtie wearing Sir Lancelot Spratt imitators he believed dominated the profession.

By the mid-point of a career spanning six decades, Dollery could legitimately lay claim to having fathered clinical pharmacology as a subspecialty. By that point he had also played a key part in developing the drugs that transformed hypertension from a mass killer in the West to a condition routinely treated in primary care.