Eric Robert Beck: cofounder of the Doctors Award Redistribution Scheme and major contributor to medical education

Principles

Eric was passionate about social justice and equality and the principles of the NHS, attitudes to which his refugee background probably contributed. His German speaking father, Adolph Beck, was born in Austro-Hungarian Prague. He qualified in medicine in Frankfurt, where he had met and married, while still a student, Leni, a nurse and a Catholic. Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933 Adolph was sacked from his university post for being Jewish. He and Leni fled to Paris, where Eric was conceived but, as they moved on, he was born in England. Fear of a Nazi invasion led to Eric being baptised, but the family was resolutely secular. Eric lost most of his paternal relatives in the holocaust, and a maternal uncle in a U-boat.

After requalifying, Adolph secured a post as pathologist in Burnley, where Eric acquired his love of Burnley Football Club. This remained undiminished by the family’s move to north west London, thanks to Adolph’s new consultant bacteriologist job. At St Paul’s School, Eric was a contemporary of Jonathan Miller and Oliver Sacks.

Eric followed his father’s example and married a nurse while still a medical student, but in Eric’s final year, Pat developed Hodgkin’s disease, from which she died some 20 years later. Their daughter, Helen, was also diagnosed with lymphoma at about the same age as her mother and died from radiation induced cardiac failure in 2014.

Despite his personal grief, Eric’s life was one of lasting achievement, with major contributions to postgraduate and undergraduate medical education. He recognised, while still a registrar, the lack of appropriate teaching for the examination for membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP), an essential gateway-cum-barrier to higher training in medicine and, at that time, exclusive and a lottery. There were but 23 passes when Eric obtained his MRCP. As medical registrar at London’s University College Hospital (UCH), Eric, with two colleagues, devised a correspondence course and subsequently a book, Tutorials in Differential Diagnosis, introducing a problem solving approach to the diagnostic process. Both proved very popular.

Medical diplomat and teacher

The Royal College of Physicians was already planning reforms along these lines and appreciated the relevance of the teaching material produced by Eric and his colleagues. Eric was recruited to the membership exam committees, of which he duly became chairman of the Part 2 board and a driving force for achieving change. A skilled medical diplomat, Eric enjoyed travelling and helped establish the exam and local postgraduate diplomas in several centres in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Without doubt, Eric’s major medical legacy is that today’s membership exam is objective, fair, and structured; encourages training in all the relevant clinical skills; and is now thoroughly fit for purpose.

Eric’s diplomatic skills also proved invaluable at Whittington Hospital. When UCH Medical School approached the hospital for help with undergraduate teaching, Eric was tasked with negotiating the arrangements. There was no problem with the physicians; however, the surgeons were not on easy terms with their opposite numbers. There was also the need to ensure the Whittington was not being used as a temporary expedient. Eric helped achieve the establishment of an undergraduate centre and professorial academic units of medicine and surgery so that Whittington came to provide a third campus, with UCH and the Royal Free, of the UCLH medical school.

Teaching was part of Eric’s DNA. He was teaching communication skills to first year students at the Whittington only three days before his stroke in March 2018. His achievements in both undergraduate and postgraduate medical education have been publicly recognised by distinguished awards, the fellowship of University College London and the President’s Medal at the Royal College of Physicians in 1999—only the second to be awarded.

Eric’s non-medical interests were opera, notably Wagner, squash, long distance footpath walking, and football, with two United Hospitals’ cup winner medals to his credit. He died peacefully, wearing a T shirt bearing a quote from former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly: “The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life.”

Eric leaves his second wife, Pam; their daughter, Lucy; Martin, his son with Pat; and two grandsons, James and Lawrence.