Tim Black
| Dr TRL (Tim) Black, CBE | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | medicine public health reproductive health |
| Institutions | Marie Stopes International |
| Known for | family planning |
| Influences | Marie Stopes |
Timothy Reuben Ladbroke "Tim" Black CBE (7 January 1937 – 11 December 2014) was a family planning pioneer and founder of Marie Stopes International in London. He served as chief executive of Marie Stopes International for 30 years, from 1976 to 2006.
During that time he built Maries Stopes International into one of the world's largest family planning organisations, which now works in more than 40 countries providing family planning and reproductive healthcare to over six million couples each year.
Tim was awarded the CBE in the 1994 Queen’s Birthday Honours for ‘Services to International family Planning in Developing Countries’.
Tim Black grew up in a village in Sussex, England, where he met his future wife Jean. The pair were married in 1962, after Tim qualified in medicine, and started their adventures together by travelling to South Africa and then up to Harare in Zimbabwe, where Tim spent a year as a house doctor.
After Tim's year in Rhodesia he and Jean took off three months and drove in a DKW jeep up through Africa, across to Tunis, Europe and back home to Sussex.
On his return to England, Tim worked as a senior house officer and registrar while studying for membership of the Royal College of Physicians at Croydon General and Harefield Hospitals. Jean, meanwhile, worked as a medical secretary at Queen Mary's Hospital in Carshalton. In 1966, looking for more excitement, Tim and Jean drove to India through Europe, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jean, by this time, was expecting their first child. Jane was born in Queensland, Australia in October 1966, after which the Black family went to New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea) where Tim was medical superintendent of a 120-bed hospital and 10,000 square miles (26,000 km2) of bush.
Tim describes in his own words the moment he became convinced of the urgent need for family planning:
"As a physician committed to a full-time career in fertility control I am often asked the question: When did you first become interested in family planning. I can quote the year, the month, the day.
"I was visiting an aid post in a rural, remote jungle area of New Guinea. Towards the end of a long day, a woman of about 30, in a grass skirt, shyly laid a small crying baby on the crude bamboo table which served as an examination couch. The baby, a three-month-old boy with a distended abdomen, had a small hernia. He was dehydrated and like many babies in that region, underfed, for mothers are often unable to obtain the adequate protein diet so necessary for a good flow of breast milk. Besides, she was still suckling another child of about two-and-a-half years.
...
Wikipedia