Clinician, medical teacher and writer

Clinician, medical teacher and writer

Born: August 8, 1920. Died: November 11, 2013.

DR John Lister, who has died aged 93, played a breakthrough role in defining the nature of diabetes in the 1950s. He was the first physician to distinguish between what he named Type I and Type II - a distinction he drew from a meticulous database he kept of his patients.

He realized that the patients' sensitivity to insulin depended on factors including their shape, size and weight and that, in many cases, they had a genetic susceptibility to the condition - an inflammation of the liver. He designated his younger, relatively thin patients, with normal blood pressure, as Type I and the older, often overweight patients with hypertension, as Type II, but it was more than two decades later, in the 1970s, that his work was recognised as a breakthrough in the field.

Apart from hepatitis, Dr Lister, who was born in the village of Cambus, near Alloa in Clackmannanshire, became engaged in general with constitution and disease, analysing how the genetic physical characteristics of his patients may have played a role in their predilection to any given disease, not just hepatitis.

A physician who served both privately and in the fledgling NHS in the post-war years, he also became known on both sides of the Atlantic as a medical writer, penning an influential column entitled By the London Post in the New England Journal of Medicine, or NEJM. It was published by the Massachusetts Medical Society, once a month for almost three decades starting in 1952.

The NEJM describes itself as the oldest continuously published medical journal in the world and remains among the most prestigious, read by medical professionals around the world. Many of Dr Lister's articles explained, notably to his American peers, the evolution and improvements within Britain's National Health Service, and were seen as helping foster Anglo-American relations and cooperation in the medical field.

Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, he wrote of the progress of the NHS, good and bad, balancing its growing benefits against its growing costs and warning of the dangers to the health service of what he called changing political winds. They are comments that are equally valid today and which were keenly noted by his peers in the US.

It was in 1976 that he first suggested an independent Health Services Board to protect the NHS and, although it took more than 30 years, he lived just long enough to see such legislation passed to create such a board to allocate NHS resources.

Away from his NHS work, at his private clinic in Buckinghamshire, he found himself regularly sought out by British and Hollywood actors who were filming at the busy Pinewood and Bray studios in the area. As a consultant physician at the King Edward V11 hospital in Windsor, he also treated royalty, always with his customary discretion. He became a dean at the University of London, supporting the training and development of doctors in all branches of medicine, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Physicians.

Having also written occasional medical articles for The Times of London, Dr Lister wrote his final column for the NEJM - his 339th in all - in 1980. The American College of Physicians awarded him an honorary fellowship, saying he had had "a major impact on world medicine … fostering Anglo-American medical friendship more effectively than any physician of his time."

He was born in Cambus, Clackmannanshire, where he used to cross the village's famous Iron Bridge. His father, Thomas Lister, was a chartered accountant, and his mother was Anna Black. Thomas Lister, who was born in Leslie, Fife, was an accountant with Thompson Maclintock all his working life, starting out in the Glasgow office, and ending up as the senior partner in London.

The young John Lister went to the historic St Paul's School on the river Thames at Barnes, London, before graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in natural sciences and starting his career at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London.

During the war, he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps, first in France as the allies moved in and later in Germany. Returning to the UK as a senior registrar at London's Royal Free, a major teaching hospital, he became interested in constitution and disease, and particularly diabetes. It was in 1951 that he first distinguished between Type I and Type II in an article in the British Medical Journal entitled ­Insulin Sensitivity in Diabetes Mellitus.

He married Eileen, herself a doctor, during the war and they were married for 53 years. Before she died in 1996, their home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire was regularly visited by friends from the medical profession around the world. According to his sons, he never forgot his Scottish roots and returned regularly to play golf in East Lothian or walk in the Borders.

He is survived by his second wife Moyra, whom he married when he was 80, and by two sons from his first marriage to Eileen. A third son died when he was a teenager.