Douglas Gairdner

Douglas Montagu Temple Gairdner DM FRCP (19 November 1910 – 10 May 1992) was a British paediatrician, research scientist, academic, author, and for fifteen years editor of Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Gairdner, the son of William Henry Temple Gairdner, an Anglican missionary, and grandson of Sir William Tennant Gairdner, KCB, a medical doctor and professor, was born in Scotland on 19 November 1910. His mother was Mary Mitchell. He was the great-nephew of historian James Gairdner. Gairdner was named for his father's late friend, Douglas M. Thornton who had died three years before Gairdner's birth. Gairdner had four siblings. His very early life was spent in Egypt where his father was a missionary. Gairdner's father died in 1928, when Gairdner was 17 years of age.

Gairdner attended Kelvinside Academy, Glasgow Dragon School, Oxford; and Gresham's School, Holt. He went to school with W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten and sang madrigals with classmate Peter Pears.

He read chemistry at the University of Oxford but switched to medicine, did clinical training at Middlesex Hospital and was awarded his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery Degree in 1936. He did his residency (house physician) in paediatrics at The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street in Bloomsbury, London in 1937-8. Gairdner described his experience there in a memoir written a half-century later. He wrote, "I recall the sheer enjoyment of working there, but also the periods of overwhelming exhaustion."

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