Robert Campbell Garry

Prof Robert Campbell Garry DSc (1933) OBE FRSE LLD (1900–1993) was Professor of Medicine at both St Andrews University and Glasgow University. During the Second World War, as an expert on human physiology, he advised on human tolerance of extreme weather conditions and forces, as experienced by high altitude pilots.

He was born in Glasgow on 21 April 1900 the son of Robert Garry and his wife Mary Campbell, both from the north-east of Scotland. His father was a biologist who was Head of Science at Glasgow High School for Girls. Robert junior was educated at Queens Park School in Glasgow. In 1917 he went to Glasgow University to study Medicine. He graduated MB ChB in 1922.

In 1933 he took a role as Head of Physiology working with John Boyd Orr at Aberdeen University. In 1935 he became Professor of Physiology at St Andrews University.

He was an active promoter of the Workers Educational association and was one of the first high-ranking scientists to talk on the radio (from 1936) on scientific matters, in an effort of raising scientific awareness to the masses.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1937. His proposers were Alexander David Peacock, Percy Theodore Herring, David Rutherford Dow and Edward Thomas Copson. He served as Vice President to the Society from 1952 to 1955. In the Second World War he made extensive physiological studies, especially on airmen, to assess the effects of g-forces, stress and high altitude. He contributed to the understanding of the gastrointestinal tract, and was the first to use the term 'guarding reflex' with regards to feedback signals of the nervous system.

In 1947 he moved from St Andrews to Glasgow University and remained there until retirement in 1970 whereupon he retired with his wife, Flora Garry, to the Perthshire village of Comrie.

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