Obituary - David Bennett

and admired but few are loved. Th e avalanche of tributes and accolades that have fl ooded in since the tragic and premature death of David Bennett demonstrates the intense warmth and aff ection in which he was held. David qualifi ed from the Middlesex Hospital, London, in 1963. He spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in the pulmonary physiology lab at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore but otherwise worked solely in leading London hospitals. In 1974, he became the fi rst director of the intensive care unit at St. George’s Hospital and, in 1997, professor of intensive care. After formally retiring in 2007, he maintained research and teaching interests as a visiting professor at Guy’s and St. Th omas’ Hospitals. He was one of the founding fathers of British critical care and a leading fi gure on the international stage. His fi rst paper was published in 1962 [1]. His pioneering work in hemodynamic monitoring and physiology began in the 1960s with seminal work on electro cardiography, Doppler ultrasound (suprasternal and esophageal), and pulmonary artery catheters, followed by studies with gastric tonometry, lithium dilution measurement of cardiac output and central venous oxygen saturation. He strongly promoted their incorporation into routine clinical practice, arguing cogently that guided physiological manipulation was superior to arbitrary and oftenmisplaced decision-making. He often used techniques of guided physiological manipulation to experiment on a wide range of then-novel pharmacological compounds, including nitroglycerin, dopexamine, new hydroxyethyl starches, pentoxifylline, esmolol, and carvedilol, and was the fi rst to report the use of nitric oxide synthase inhibitors in patients with septic shock and this led to larger randomized trials. He championed the concept of perioperative circu la tory optimization, initially proposed by William Shoe maker, to improve outcomes in high-risk surgical patients. Having confi rmed the benefi ts in a landmark study that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1993 [2] and that was reinforced by sub sequent studies, David became an impassioned advocate. More than anyone else, he put this concept on the map. A recent endorsement by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence gave him enormous satisfaction. He was a superb teacher, nurturing successive generations of grateful intensivists who progressed to successful research, clinical, and leadership careers in their own right. He organized events ranging from a European intensive care congress to highly successful summer schools in Brijuni, Croatia. He held important roles within the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM) and in senior editorial positions for a variety of critical care journals, including cardiovascular section editor for Critical Care. Th e UK Intensive Care Society and ESICM both acknowledged his major contributions by awarding him honorary fellowships. David inspired through passionate example. For him, heaven was an animated discussion surrounding a new concept, a trial design, an exciting research fi nding, or a controversial paper. Hell was the (rare) inability to elicit a response. He was intensely modest; even his close family was unaware of the scale of his achievements. David exuded humanity and loathed the mundane. Charac teristically perhaps, the disease that defeated him, mastocytosis leading to a mast cell leukemia, was extremely © 2010 BioMed Central Ltd Obituary – David Bennett