Jim Petrie died on August 31st, 2001, two weeks before his 60th birthday from an aggressive brain tumour which had been diagnosed in May. His untimely death is a huge sadness to his family, to his many friends and colleagues and a great loss to medicine. He died at a time when his contributions in several fields had begun to produce concrete evidence of benefit to patient management and to the public health.
Jim's professional life was spent in Aberdeen. Born in that city, he was brought up in Geneva where his father worked as a doctor for the World Health Organization (WHO). He returned to Scotland at the age of 11, already an expert skier and bilingual. He put both of these attributes to good use in later years. A ski instructor and a renowned downhill racer himself, he was to lead a consortium which opened the Lecht ski slopes in Upper Donside which greatly contributed to the financial regeneration of the area. His talent for languages was to prove of great value in the many committees of WHO and the Council of Europe on drug related topics which he was to chair.
Having been appointed Senior Lecturer in Therapeutics in the University of Aberdeen at the age of 29, Jim was to become its Professor of Clinical Pharmacology in 1984, and Head of the merged Departments of Medicine and Therapeutics in 1994. His long standing interest in the relevance of prescribing to the public health led to his appointment as Co-Director of the Scottish Health Services Research Unit in 1986.
In 1998, he was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, a post which he held with great distinction until March, 2001. Under his enthusiastic leadership, his college played an increasing role in addressing current problems in medicine in the UK. He still managed to balance the many commitments of the presidency with his research interests, although the extensive foreign travel which he took in an ambassadorial role for the college sometimes seemed to take its toll and the short recuperative spells in Strathdon in Aberdeenshire became even more treasured. The unswerving support of his wife Xanthe was of huge help to Jim in these busy times.
Jim was also a stalwart member of the Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM) for many years. He became its Co-Vice Chairman in 1999 and one of his main contributions was to chair a new subgroup on paediatric prescribing which is beginning to make inroads into some of the anomalies in the regulations surrounding the current use of drugs in children. His incisiveness and grasp of important issues were frequently put to good use at the CSM, in translating difficult issues into sensible conclusions.
His main contributions to clinical pharmacology and therapeutics were based on his early realization that if drug prescribing could be based on sound scientific principles, it could be translated into guidelines which would not only improve the practice of medicine and hence the public health, but also make its teaching more logical. Further, computerized medical information systems, if appropriately managed, could contribute greatly in this area. Jim was responsible for establishing the Scottish Intercollegiate Guideline Network (SIGN) which has now produced over 50 clinical guidelines for a variety of medical conditions. SIGN guidelines are not only of practical importance for medicine in Scotland, but have also achieved national and international currency as a paradigm of how such an exercise should be established. Both WHO and the Council of Europe recognized Jim's contributions to the field by inviting him to chair their expert panels on best practice for guideline development.
These same principles had found earlier expression in Aberdeen where he introduced a shared care system between hospitals and primary care for the management of patients with hypertension, and this model has subsequently been used in many other centres. His interest in hypertension led him to question decision making based on random, casual, nonstandardized blood pressure measurements and so, with colleagues, he established guidelines on how blood pressure should be measured, both for clinical management and research purposes. Much of his early work on studies of new drugs in hypertension was published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. He was also heavily involved in the Department of Health computer project on hypertension which resulted in the publication of a series of epidemiological articles on the influence of such factors as alcohol on levels of blood pressure in the community.
Jim Petrie died at the height of his achievements and still with a huge contribution to make. He had already been awarded the CBE in 1996 for services to medicine. Some 400 of his friends and colleagues attended his funeral on a chilly early autumn morning in his beloved Strathdon, giving support to his wife, his four children (all of whom are doctors) and his six grandchildren.