Shortly after the National Health Service was established in 1948, a new breed of doctor emerged who was clinically competent but sought to go further by undertaking research into the cause of disease, usually in collaboration with scientists. Michael Oliver, who has died aged 89, was in the vanguard of this movement, and with his biochemist colleague in Edinburgh, George Boyd, he demonstrated the relationship between cholesterol and coronary artery disease.
A tall, elegant figure, immaculate in his white coat, MFO, as he was known, would occasionally visit his wards and then rush, with arms and legs flailing, down the long medical corridor to the department of cardiology in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, followed by his breathless entourage. He was envied, as were his few like-minded colleagues, by the more prosaic clinicians on the staff who felt that academic colleagues like him did not contribute sufficiently at the coalface. But the international standing of that hospital unquestionably depended upon these clinical scientists.
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