Obituary: Dr John Forbes Munro OBE, FRCPE, FRCP(Glas), FRCP

Born: 25 June, 1933, in Edinburgh. Died: 4 July, 2013, in East Lothian, aged 80
Dr. John Forbes MunroDr. John Forbes Munro
Dr. John Forbes Munro

Born in Edinburgh, John Munro’s early life shuttled between India and Edinburgh, before the family settled in Essex, where he attended Chigwell School. Patterns established there that threaded through his later life included a love of history, English, classics, sport and a simultaneous but profound rejection of bureaucracy, hypocrisy, authority or cant.

He declined a scholarship to read history at Oxford, having had what he described as a “religious” conversion to study medicine. This course was, however, temporarily put on hold while he performed National Service, where he qualified as a physiotherapist in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

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Army discipline and John’s persona were destined to be uneasy bedfellows. In retrospect, for his friends, the surprise was not that he was put on jankers – punishment – for “dumb insolence”, but that the first word of the charge was present.

Oxford’s loss was Edinburgh’s gain. Having done no science at school, first-year medicine was hard work, but the knowledge and skills gained in the army played a role in his achieving the gold medal in anatomy and, as soon as he started to see patients clinically he flourished, achieving many distinctions and graduating in 1960 MBChB with honours.

Early postgraduate posts in the Edinburgh teaching hospitals provided vast and diverse clinical experience. He was influenced by inspirational and committed mentors, including Sir Derrick Dunlop and Dr Leslie Duncan. He saw at first hand the importance and power of exceptional teaching and the application of sound clinical skills.

He absorbed these lessons and built on them, adding his unique personality, perspective and enthusiasm.

Here, clearly, was a man destined for a high-flying post in hospital medicine.

To have accepted the post of consultant physician at the Eastern General and Edenhall hospitals in 1968 must, to his contemporaries, have seemed the professional equivalent of banishment to the wilderness. But if Edinburgh medicine thought it had managed finally to control or even geld a “scruffy, disruptive character” (his own words) it had miscalculated badly.

For the following 25 years, the Eastern was the attachment that every medical student and junior doctor craved. The reason was simple: John Munro was not just a consummate clinician, the finest, most charismatic diagnostician of his era, he was a magician.

He had the ability to conjure the most obscure and difficult diagnoses when most needed. Unlike a magician, with patients, there was no showmanship linked to this. Indeed, the opposite applied. His care, compassion and empathy were profound and he had the rare attribute of clinical pragmatism. If a treatment worked, and the patient benefited, then it didn’t matter that the “experts” demurred.

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In a matchless collaboration with the local GPs, John – and his colleagues – delivered an exceptional level of commitment and all-inclusive care.

In part, this was linked to another rare phenomenon: with him, the patient was not just important, but the only focus of attention. Care was truly democratic and delivered as a team. Input from the most junior nurse or student to the most senior colleague was sought, encouraged and enacted if it could help the patient.

A doctor’s legacy rests with his trainees. As a teacher John Munro rapidly became a legend. Showmanship could, and did, play a part – although the medium never took over the message.

Generations of students worldwide remember the passion and enthusiasm he conveyed. He had an extraordinary ability to recognise and develop talents in his trainees. A measure of his success is the fact that many of his former junior staff are among the most influential and global leaders in a multitude of medical disciplines. Although not primarily a researcher, he encouraged his staff by example and many became respected and innovative researchers. He published extensively in the fields of obesity and metabolic medicine and was a major international speaker.

As an accomplished wordsmith, submitting to him a draft for publication for suggestions and correction was perilous. He applied equal rigour to his own work and when he took over as editor of MacLeod’s Clinical Examination, he transformed it from a book of local and national interest to one of the most highly reputed international undergraduate texts.

Retirement from the NHS in 1994 allowed extensions of both medical and non-medical activities: as council member and, later, registrar at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, he was instrumental in developing and refining the MRCP (UK) examination and taking it to India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Singapore. As an ambassador for Edinburgh and the UK, he is still warmly remembered and spoken of there.

Stimulated by his father, John had a lifelong interest in art, and he had a “good eye”, particularly enjoying contemporary Scottish art. Many young artists working in Scotland owe a debt of gratitude to him for his encouragement, support and direction.

He established a fund at the Eastern and organised exhibitions there predating and prompting the later development of the Paintings in Hospital scheme. At each exhibition, staff, patients and visitors were asked to vote on their favourite work. The painting with the most votes was then purchased and displayed in a patient area. He ran the annual Christmas exhibition at the college for many years, raising many thousands of pounds for charity.

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Wearing, with pride, his Full of Eastern Promise T-shirt, he was a cunning and fearless hockey player but thought nothing, if his team were winning excessively to his mind, of joining the opposition and scoring for them.

An expert fisherman, keen ornithologist, and supremely combative gardener – the vegetable-growing contests between John and his great friend and colleague Dr Jimmy Ledingham were fiercely contested and the results never agreed upon.

Although he could “scrub-up” well when required, John’s dress aspirations matched his choice of rusting eastern European cars perfectly. He was most in his comfort zone wearing Wellington boots, a pair of drooping bleached shorts and patched shirt buttoned askew.

In such garb, it is difficult to criticise the unfortunate police officer who stopped him on Portobello High Street en route to an emergency at the Eastern. The conundrum must have been what offence to charge him with: speeding, driving a vehicle which was manifestly unroadworthy or offending public sartorial decency.

A man with the highest standards of honesty, integrity and endless compassion, humour and generosity, the human condition interested him more than anything. His family was profoundly important to him. He married Jeanie when he was a medical student and she was the rock on which everything he did was built, and their three daughters and six grandsons gave him infinite and lasting pleasure.

A ceremony in remembrance of the life and work of Dr John Forbes Munro will be held at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh on Friday, 11 October at 6pm, to which all friends are invited.

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