Professor Paul Beeson

Former Nuffield Professor of Medicine at Oxford who was an expert in infectious diseases

Paul Bruce Beeson, physician: born Livingston, Montana 18 October 1908; Instructor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Chief Physician, American Red Cross/Harvard Field Hospital Unit, Salisbury 1940-42; Assistant, then Associate Professor of Medicine, Emory Medical School 1942-46, Professor 1946-52; Professor of Medicine, Yale University 1952-65; Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine, Oxford University 1965-74; Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford 1965-74; Hon KBE 1973; Professor of Medicine, University of Washington 1984-82 (Emeritus); married 1942 Barbara Neal (two sons, one daughter); died Exeter, New Hampshire 14 August 2006.

Paul Beeson was a remarkable physician, researcher and teacher, and an expert in infectious diseases whose research explained the causes of high persistent fevers. He showed that hepatitis could be transmitted by blood transfusion. He made important discoveries about kidney infections and bacterial endocarditis. He discovered a substance called interleukin-1. He showed how parasites caused a blood condition called eosinophilia.

During the Second World War he worked at Harvard Hospital in Salisbury, which was given by the United States to cope with expected epidemics. He was Nuffield Professor of Medicine at Oxford and was instrumental in setting up Green College. He was also Professor of Medicine at Yale and Washington universities and wrote medical textbooks.

Beeson started as a conservative who intended a career in private practice, and ended as a liberal concerned with medical care for the uninsured and old, medical ethics, and the medical consequences of nuclear warfare. He rose to the top of academic medicine not only on account of his outstanding research but also for his humility, compassion, charm and sense of fairness. Towards the end of his career he worked at a Veterans Administration hospital, which provides free treatment.

He was a superb clinical teacher whose primary concern was for patients. Professor John Stein of Oxford University says, "Paul Beeson was a wonderful clinician, and also incredibly kind to young people like me."

Paul Beeson was born in 1908 in rural Montana and spent most of his childhood in Anchorage, Alaska, where his father was general practitioner and surgeon for the Alaskan railway; Beeson senior often travelled miles by dog-sled to visit patients. Paul entered Washington University in Seattle when he was 16, and at the age of 19 joined his elder brother at McGill Medical School in Montreal, who accepted him before he finished his undergraduate education. He qualified in 1933 and did his two-year internship - his postgraduate hospital training - at the University of Pennsylvania before entering practice with his father and brother in Wooster, Ohio, from 1935 to 1937.

He left to pursue research at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where he worked under Dr Oswald Avery, who had discovered that genes contain DNA 20 years before James Watson and Francis Crick discovered that the molecules were arranged as a double helix.

In 1939 he moved to Harvard, working in the university medical service under Dr Soma Weiss, one of the giants of American medical teaching; his department was, said Beeson in an interview published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2000, "a sort of Camelot" for young doctors. Beeson was profoundly influenced by Weiss's dedication to his students and his respectful concern for patients as people and not just as teaching tools.

With the outbreak of war, experts predicted that Britain would suffer epidemics of infectious disease when people huddled together in air-raid shelters. America's gift to Britain during the war was, therefore, a complete fever hospital. Harvard Hospital consisting of prefabricated wooden huts, shipped across the Atlantic during the Blitz along with volunteer doctors and nurses to staff it. The Ministry of Health provided the site and made concrete foundations. Beeson spent two years there, but the US staff went home when the expected epidemics did not happen.

The building was next used as a US army medical laboratory, supervised by Colonel Ralph Muckenfuss. The buildings then went to the newly formed blood transfusion service, and then the Friends Ambulance Unit, who were non-combatants. (One of them was detailed to serve tea to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was visiting, but the great man refused to be served by a pacifist.) After the war the Americans gave the buildings to the British government, and they were used for the Common Cold Research Unit. The buildings still stand in Odstock, near Salisbury.

Beeson met a young American nurse, Barbara Neal, at Harvard Hospital. They married in New York when they returned to the US in July 1942, and Beeson joined Emory University in Atlanta, becoming chairman of the department of medicine in 1947. In 1952 he was recruited to Yale as chairman of medicine, and oversaw the rapid growth of the department.

During these years he uncovered the mechanisms by which infection with pathogens caused fevers. With Dr Elisha Atkins, he showed that fever was often a bodily response to infection rather than merely caused by the pathogens, when white blood cells released the substance that they identified as interleukin-1. He spent the year 1958/59 as visiting researcher at the Wright-Fleming Institute at St Mary's Hospital, London.

Later, with Robert Petersdorf at Yale, he studied patients with persistent fevers over 38.3C, found that many were rooted in infections, cancer and rheumatic diseases, and suggested diagnostic guidelines in a landmark paper in the journal Medicine. "These," said Dr Lawrence Cohen, his successor at Yale, "are as relevant in 2006 as in 1961." Beeson is remembered at Yale by the Paul B. Beeson Professorship in internal medicine, established in 1981.

In 1965, when the UK was losing many of its best scientists to America, Beeson came to Oxford University as Nuffield Professor of Medicine and Fellow of Magdalen College. He was treading in the footsteps of William Osler, who left Canada to become Regius Professor at Oxford.

There he redesigned the undergraduate medical curriculum, using pathology, microbiology and pharmacology as bridges between the preclinical and clinical years. He attempted to weld the separate and autonomous medical "firms" into a team sharing facilities, teaching duties, and consultants. Professor John Stein said,

He laid the foundations for Oxford's current pre-eminence in infectious diseases, correctly spotting that the genetic revolution was going to transform infectious diseases sooner than any other branch of medicine. He reformed the clinical course introducing more continuous assessment, and clinical examinations rather than essays.

Knighthoods are not conferred on foreigners, and therefore Beeson was awarded an honorary KBE in 1973. When Sir Richard Doll decided to establish a new college at Oxford to cater for the needs of the greatly expanded medical faculty, Beeson persuaded Cecil Green, the English-born head of Texas Instruments, to donate the first million dollars. Beeson's final gift to Oxford was to donate his college pension, which he said he did not need, for the upkeep of Osler's old house at 13 Norham Gardens, which is now the Warden's Lodgings.

In 1974 Beeson returned to the US, as Veterans Administration Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Washington University in Seattle, where he remained until his "retirement" as emeritus professor in 1981. He continued to do ward rounds for many years, and wrote and edited books and journals.

He wrote The Eosinophil in 1989 (eosinophils are a type of white blood cell). With Sir Ronald Bodley Scott and later, after Scott's death, with John Walton (now Lord Walton of Detchant), he edited The Oxford Companion to Medicine (1986). He edited The Yearbook of Medicine (1948-59), T.R. Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (1950-54), and, from 1959 to 1982, the Cecil-Loeb Textbook of Medicine. Lord Walton said, "He was helpful, kind and supportive, an outstanding clinician and a delightful companion." John Stein said,

We all used his textbook when we were taking our MRCP. It was the textbook, as the Oxford Textbook of Medicine is now.

Beeson's interest in geriatrics led him to believe that doctors must be healers and not executioners. He advocated death with dignity and rejected aggressive treatment for the hopelessly ill. The US National Institute on Aging now offers career development fellowships that bear Beeson's name.

Paul Beeson was the subject of two biographies: Taking Care: the legacy of Soma Weiss, Eugene Stead, and Paul Beeson by William Hollingsworth (1995) and Physician: the life of Paul Beeson by Richard Rapport (2001).

He was a quiet and modest man who never raised his voice and who sought neither fame nor fortune. He was first and foremost interested in patients' care and was disheartened by what he called the "industrialisation of medicine", the dominance of specialists in medical schools and the erosion of bonds between physician and patient. He played poker and golf, was a voracious reader, and supported the Seattle Mariners baseball team.

Throughout his career, his wife Barbara was "the woman behind the scenes". After he retired she became active in the Seattle community, and he became the behind-the-scenes helper. In 2002 the two of them moved to a retirement community in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Caroline Richmond