Sam Hanna Bell Samuel Beckett John Hewitt Bernard (Barney) Hughes James Joseph Magennis VC Frances Elizabeth Clarke Stewart Parker William Carleton Rosamond Praegar

Andrew Gilchrist (1899 - 1995):
Physician and cardiologist


Andrew Rae Gilchrist, a son of the manse, was born in Holywood, County Down and educated at George Watson's Boy's College, Edinburgh, Campbell College, Belfast 1913-1916, and the University of Edinburgh, 1917-1921. At the young age of thirty he became Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and was awarded a gold medal for his MD thesis in 1933. After junior appointments at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, the Princess Elizabeth Hospital for Children, London and the Rockefeller Hospital in New York, he was appointed a Consultant at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in 1930.

In the same year, he reported in the Edinburgh Medical Journal the first seven cases of coronary thrombosis recorded in Europe; earlier, he had made the first clinical diagnosis of myocardial infarction, confirmed at necropsy in Edinburgh in 1928. He viewed coronary heart attacks, first described in 1911, as effectively a new disease. His work made him the founder of cardiology in Scotland, and the Edinburgh clinical school of medicine into one of the finest. His wide medical interests came to include surgery for congenital heart lesions and later rheumatic heart disease, penicillin in subacute bacterial endocarditis, anticoagulants in acute myocardial infarction, drug treatment of hypertension, and the effect of drugs and diet on cholesterol concentrations.

In 1959, he was a founder member of the British Heart Foundation. Given the paucity of funding for cardiology at the time, this organisation appealed directly to the public, with considerable success, apart from the enormous sums raised, 1986 saw the founding of the Duke of Edinburgh chair of cardiology at Edinburgh University and the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Gilchrist was made FRCP in 1944, Examiner in medicine for all Scottish universities; Makerere University College, East Africa; and Baghdad University. He was President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 1957-60, who appointed him honorary Fellow in 1959, there followed the appointment honorary Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, as Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow in 1961, and in the same year the award of the CBE.



Born: 7 July 1899
Died: 1 March 1995
Richard Froggatt
Acknowledgements:

Wesley McCann