John Newsom-Davis was born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, the eldest child and only son of Kenneth Newsom-Davis, the managing director of the Davis Gas Cooker Company, and his wife Eileen, a doctor's daughter. He had a twin sister, Julia. He was educated at Sherborne and Pembroke College, Cambridge. During his two years national service in the RAF (1951–53), he qualified for full pilot training, and learned to fly Meteor jet fighters.[2]
In 1963 he married Rosemary Elizabeth Schmid, an English Swiss, who later became an educational psychologist, working in child development.[3] They had two daughters and a son, and (at the date of his death) seven grandchildren.[2]
Career
Newsom-Davis qualified MB BChir in 1960 at the Middlesex Hospital, and then joined Tom Sears at the National Hospital, Queen Square. After studying the physiology of breathing there, he spent a year at the Cornell Medical Center, New York City, working with Fred Plum on the central pathways involved in breathing. On returning from New York in 1970 he was appointed consultant neurologist jointly at the National and at the Royal Free Hospital. At the latter hospital he built up an active research group, becoming the first MRC Clinical Research Professor in 1980.[2]
In 1987 he was recruited to the Action Research Chair of Clinical Neurology at Oxford University, with a Fellowship at St Edmund Hall, bringing with him most of his research team from the Royal Free.[5] At Oxford not only did he build up clinical neuroscience in his own field of immune-mediated and genetic diseases, he also established a Centre for the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain,[6] which was recognised as a world leader.[2]
In 1997 he succeeded Ian McDonald as editor of the Neurology Journal Brain, making it one of the first scientific journals to go online.[7]
After his "retirement" from Oxford in 1998, he continued to edit Brain until 2004 and to hold a weekly myasthenia clinic, as well as honouring many invitations to lecture abroad. He also took on the huge task, together with the National Institutes of Health in the United States, of organising and funding a multi-centre trial (over 80 centres) to determine whether thymectomy is an appropriate treatment for myasthenia gravis.[2]
^"On the day of the accident, Prof Newsom-Davis had visited a neurological clinic in Bucharest where he intended to start a study about early thymectomy in MG patients (according to Dr Ioana Mindruta, the clinician involved in the study).She told me that everybody was so excited about this collaboration, so much hope for us the patients... but once more we were so unlucky, ...we lost a father too... Ioana told me that the professor and his wife just left the clinic and went to a trip to see the ancient painted monasteries in Moldavia ...then was the tragedy. It's awful." (Radulescu 2007)
Godwin-Austen, R (25 March 1999). "Award of ABN Medal". Association of British Neurologists. Archived from the original on 5 February 2007. Retrieved 27 September 2007.
