1 Professor Gavin Arneil was one of the most famous children’s doctors in the world. He tackled and solved the problem of toddler rickets in Glasgow in the 1950s and, with Dr Margaret Kerr and Professor J. Hutchison, he introduced BCG vaccinations for city children. In the space of eight years, pre-school tuberculosis virtually disappeared.
2 Throughout the decades at what was then Yorkhill Sick Kids’ Hospital, he treated more than 30,000 children in his ward, and thousands more as outpatients, saving the lives of many children suffering from kidney disease. He chaired the committee which commissioned the new RHSC Yorkhill in 1971, working alongside matron Olive Hume. In 1983 with the late Doctors Bentley and MacPherson he founded the Yorkhill Children’s Trust, a Scottish first.
3 Professor Arneil was born in Glasgow on March 7, 1923, the son of a lecturer and a teacher. He lived in Bearsden and Helensburgh and studied at Jordanhill College School and Glasgow University. During the Second World War, he served in the Home Guard.
4 In 1944, he joined Yorkhill as a houseman, rising to professor and honorary consultant. He retired from hospital work in 1988 but continued in the field of international child health, becoming president of the International Paediatric Association (IPA) – the only British doctor to hold the post in 100 years.
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5 Professor Arneil travelled to more than 50 countries to help and advise in children’s health, and received many honours, including the Nobel medal of the Swedish Medical Association and, in 1983, the St Mungo Prize of the City of Glasgow. He was a founding member of the Friends of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs. According to his obituary in our sister newspaper The Herald he even once successfully treated a sick chimpanzee at the Kelvin Hall Circus. He died aged 94 in January 2018.
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