Moran Campbell and clinical science.

W ith the recent death of E J M (Moran) Campbell, respiratory medicine lost one of its most notable figures of the last 50 years. Moran Campbell graduated in medicine from the Middlesex Hospital London in 1949 following a career defining intercalated BSc in physiology. He then worked as a researcher and clinician at the Middlesex and later at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and Hammersmith Hospital, with a short period of research in the laboratory of R L Riley at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. In 1968 he emigrated to Canada to become the first chairman of the Department of Medicine in the new medical school at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. He retired in 1991 but continued to teach and to take an active interest in research until shortly before his death. Campbell’s main research contributions were made when working in England in the 1950s and 1960s. His very readable memoirs convey the excitement of clinical research at a time when scientific principles were gradually being applied to clinical medicine. His curiosity was stimulated by observations in patients with respiratory disease and his research was very much aimed at understanding and solving clinical problems. Of his three main research interests, his work on the respiratory muscles developed from questioning the therapeutic benefit of breathing exercises; he addressed the most distressing symptom experienced by patients with lung disease and, above all, he was driven by the practical need to understand and improve the management of respiratory failure. In all these areas his work remains highly relevant today. Campbell strongly urged the integration of physiology into clinical medicine, co-editing with C J (John) Dickinson a very successful textbook which did precisely that. He later ventured the view that ‘‘my good fortune in having the requisite grasp of physiology and sufficient clinical experience enabled me to have ideas that would not have come from collaboration with a better physiologist and a better clinician’’. He pointed to the danger of respiratory physiology becoming too abstruse and detached from clinical reality: reviewing a textbook of cardiorespiratory physiology, he deprecated ‘‘the tendency to foster a priesthood of respiratory physiologists’’ and in this context he contrasted the situation with that in cardiology: ‘‘Cardiologists are, of course, not inclined to refer patients to the physiology laboratory for ‘‘cardiac function tests and the opinion of a cardiac physiologist’’ so the danger is less in that field’’. Campbell’s teaching, like his writing, was forthright and inspiring and was peppered with colourful metaphors (the FEV1 was ‘‘a bronchopulmonary fart’’). In his later career he took a major interest in medical education—both undergraduate and postgraduate—and his views on the role of science in medicine make stimulating reading.