Ian Robertson

Cardiovascular doctor and expert on opera

Born: March 5, 1928;

Died: March 22, 2019

DR Ian Robertson, who has died aged 91, was a globally influential doctor and medical scientist whose research into blood pressure and heart failure, much of it carried out at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow, helped develop new medications thought to have saved thousands of lives. He was a former honorary consultant physician in the Medical Research Council Blood Pressure Unit at the Western.

Although he was English, Dr Robertson began a love affair with Scotland during his time here and returned throughout his life. An opera buff, and a prolific author on opera themes, he served as chairman of the Friends of Scottish Opera from 1999 to 2004 and was on its board of directors from 1999 to 2008, often giving colourful oral vignettes to explain the opera to first-night audiences. Blending his two great loves, he showed a particular interest in the role of doctors and medicine as portrayed in some of the great operas.

One of his favourite lecture themes – often to the Wagner Society of Scotland - was Doctors in Opera and he published the book Doctors in Opera: An Irreverent Look at Operatic Medicine in 2012. He was fascinated, and fascinated his audience, by analysing the nature and properties of the love potion in Tristan und Isolde and the causation of Siegfried’s apparent amnesia in Götterdämmerung.

Outside medicine and opera, he was also a lover of literature, focussing on the use and abuse of the English language over the centuries and especially in recent years.

It is, however, as a doctor and medical researcher that he will remain best-known, starting in 1956 at St Mary’s Hospital medical unit in Paddington, London, a unit led by Sir Stanley Peart who was known for his research into the causes and effects of high blood pressure and developing drugs to help sufferers. In 1964, a team including Dr Robertson, Anthony Lever and Jehoiada Brown came up with the first reliable method of measuring blood levels in the enzyme renin, which is secreted by the kidney.

Three years later, in 1967, Drs Robertson, Lever and Brown moved to Glasgow and the Western, where they were joined in their research by Robert Fraser and set up the Medical Research Council’s new blood pressure unit to study patients suffering from high blood pressure and/or heart failure.

Having retired, Dr Robertson focussed on his other love, opera. He was almost 80 when he got a BA with first class honours in operatic musicology at Manchester University in 2007.

The contribution of Drs Brown, Lever and Robertson to hypertension research was recognised through the Ciba Award by the High Blood Pressure Council of the United States, and the Merck Sharp & Dohme International Award of the International Society of Hypertension. Dr Robertson also went on to be senior consultant in cardiovascular medicine at the Janssen Research Foundation in Belgium.

James Ian Summers Robertson, always known as Ian, was born on March 5, 1928, in Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, to James Robertson and his wife Violet (née Summers). He was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, and later St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, University of London. He graduated Bachelor of Science with first class honours in human and comparative anatomy in 1949 and Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery with Honours, and Distinctions in Medicine and Pathology, in 1952. He married Maureen Doherty, a nurse, in 1955.

At St Mary’s in Paddington, he also found time to be captain of both the cricket and soccer teams. He was admitted as a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1954, and was subsequently elected as a Fellow. During his national service with the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1954 to 1956, he represented the Army at cricket and rugby union. He once recalled that the worst combat he ever went through was batting at first wicket down for the Army against Yorkshire. He later played cricket for West of Scotland in the Western District Cricket Union.

He worked at St Mary’s Hospital Medical Unit, initially as a lecturer in medicine, from 1956 to 1964, and, thereafter, as a senior lecturer in therapeutics and honorary consultant physician, from 1964 to 1967. And then came his work at the Western in Glasgow where he and his fellow blood pressure researchers became known for their caring bedside manner. He and his team clarified the role of the renin system in physiology and pathophysiology, especially in the treatment of high blood pressure and heart failure.

Together, they published countless papers on cardiovascular and endocrinological issues, which attracted to Glasgow researchers from around the UK and overseas.

Dr Robertson served as president of the International Society of Hypertension; chairman of the Scientific Council on Hypertension, International Society and Federation of Cardiology; Foundation President of the British Hypertension Society; chairman of the Working Group on Hypertension and the Heart, European Society of Cardiology; and as adviser on cardiovascular diseases to the World Health Organisation.

He also served as a member of the editorial board of numerous journals, including Hypertension and Journal of Hypertension, and was the author or co-author of over 400 published papers on clinical and experimental hypertension; renal, cardiac, endocrine and carcinoid disease; and clinical trials in hypertension and cardiology.

Dr Ian Robertson is survived by his wife, Maureen, children Fiona, Andrew and Kirsty, and grandchildren Damian, Nicky, Sydney, Victoria, Max and Fay.

PHIL DAVISON

(ends – pd)

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