Obituary: Professor Ronald Lowe

Charles Ronald Lowe, epidemiologist: born Walsall 30 January 1912; General Practitioner 1937-48 (Royal Army Medical Corps 1942-45); Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader in Social Medicine, Birmingham University 1948-61; Medical Adviser to General Electric Company, Birmingham 1954-61; Professor of Social and Occupational Medicine, Welsh National School of Medicine 1962-77 (Emeritus); Medical Adviser to Department of Employment 1964-72; Chairman, Industrial Injuries Advisory Council (DHSS) 1978-84; married 1938 Barbara Flanders (one daughter); died Hewelsfield, Gloucestershire 5 November 1993.

NOT LONG ago Ronald Lowe commented that during his medical student years he learnt little about public health and nothing at all about general practice. If today's medical graduate can claim to have done better, Lowe deserves a lion's share of the credit. He was a leader among those doctors who, over three or four decades, successfully shifted the profession's bias away from the exclusiveness of therapeutic medicine in hospital, to make room for the scientific study of medicine in the community, preventive medicine, and the interplay of biological, environmental, and social influences which determines risks to health. Much of his work has had world-wide significance and earned him international

renown.

Lowe's success owed much to his early experience in general practice, which ensured that he would never forget the primary tasks of medicine. For 10 years he practised at King's Heath, Birmingham - part rural, part slum-clearance council estate - and in the Royal Air Medical Corps, where for three years he was responsible for the care of Yugoslav women and children, refugees from the Dalmatian coast. He entered the public-health field at the beginning of its resurgence in 1948, joining the new Department of Social Medicine at Birmingham. There he came under the spell of the visionary brilliance of Thomas McKeown and the soaring intellect and demanding rigour of Lancelot Hogben. Lowe soon started to make conspicuous contributions to the fast-growing science of epidemiology, applying it to a wide range of common health problems - the care of the elderly infirm, the genesis of congenital malformations, respiratory tuberculosis, the risks associated with personal smoking habits, chronic bronchitis, breast cancer - the list is extensive, the problems for study were well chosen for their medical and social aptness, the inquiries were designed with the utmost rigour, the results presented with clarity and avoidance of overstatement. In 1962, Lowe took the chair of social and occupational medicine at Cardiff, where he continued his work and diversified his interests, attracting gifted students and many visitors.

Lowe's influence spread, as generations of young postgraduates trained by him took up increasingly responsible positions throughout the world. Invitations to visiting professorships took his teaching to five continents, and his work for the World Health Organisation enabled him to make a special contribution to medical services in developing countries. One of his later papers, published in the Central African Journal of Medicine in 1975, set out the priorities for health in reasoned perspective. He showed how the history of health and sickness in Britain indicated that progress depended in very small part on personal medical services; the influential factors included nutrition, subsistence income (poverty and ill-health feed on each other), sanitary engineering, housing density and amenities, personal preventive services for mothers and children, and working conditions.

Ron Lowe's humanity and love of life were combined with superb intelligence and great energy and zest. He was a man with passion, deep but unostentatious. Indeed he could sometimes appear diffident - he never sought aggrandisement and abjured pomposity. But his rapid, mordant wit entertained, educated, and braced his colleagues and friends. He was sceptical in the best sense, inclined to disbelieve authority, a man who was not taken in by loose thinking, not likely to be duped. Acerbic and sceptical as long as he thought his audience could stand it, Ron's friendship was always caring but not necessarily soothing. His passion extended deeply into music and English literature - to him there were no barriers between scientific and artistic truths. His marriage to Bobbie was a wondrous influence on both their own and their friends' lives.

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