We are pleased to announce the renaming of LT2 to the Theo Chalmers Lecture Theatre.
Theodore Moir Chalmers
b.10 July 1919 d.3 August 1984
MB ChB Edin(1941) MRCP(1948) FRCP(1965) MD Cantab(1966) MRCPE(1967) MD Edin(1970) FRCPE(1970)
The foundation of the Clinical Medical School at the University of Cambridge, after years of discussion and against seemingly insurmountable opposition, owed much to the vision and quiet determination of Theodore Chalmers. This was one of many achievements in a distinguished medical career.
Chalmers moved to Cambridge in 1962 on his appointment as consultant physician to the then United Cambridge Hospitals and East Anglian Regional Hospital Board. His main duties were at Addenbrooke’s Hospital but he also had clinical responsibilities at Fulbourn Hospital and the County Hospital at Huntingdon. From the start he set up a first class clinical service and organized postgraduate clinical teaching sessions which he maintained throughout his career. He retained his broad interest in endocrinology but now turned his attention to bone and mineral metabolism. These new interests were relatively untapped areas of research in Cambridge and over the next 20 years he and his co-workers published a series of papers on hyperparathyroidism, renal stones, metabolic bone disease and vitamin D metabolism.
In 1965 he was elected Fellow and director of medical studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he taught physiology and guided the careers of countless medical students. Although not schooled in Cambridge he was proud of his association with St John’s and had a high regard for its tradition, style and excellence. He was appointed dean of the School of Clinical Research and Postgraduate Teaching at Cambridge in the same year. It was natural, with his long academic background and deep interest in medical education, that he should take on this role and he quickly recognized the potential for extending medical education and clinical research in Cambridge, and that these goals could best be realized with the establishment there of an undergraduate clinical medical school. He espoused this cause despite the widely known and long held opposition to such a proposal from many within the University. This did not deter him and, with the favourable attitudes expressed in the Todd report of 1968 and the redevelopment of Addenbrooke’s on the ‘new site’, the time was ripe for such a venture. He was appointed to the Clinical School planning committee in 1969 and in that role travelled widely in the USA studying medical curricula. After prolonged and sometimes difficult negotiations, the clinical school was established in 1975 and Chalmers became the foundation dean. He held this post for four years before returning to full-time clinical practice in 1979. During that time a novel curriculum was introduced, incorporating in-depth topic teaching and extending the Cambridge preclinical supervision system into the clinical years.
As a physician, Chalmers was a man of the highest intelligence and integrity. He brought the best out of people and was particularly good with medical students. An excellent and decisive clinician, with a wide knowledge of medicine, he consistently took superb clinical notes and was an avid reader of journals. His modest, calm and phlegmatic manner was an example to us all. An honest and straightforward man with a light, dry sense of humour, he was never harsh or unduly critical but he despised dogma, arrogance and incompetence.