Roger Robinson

Short abstract

A leader in paediatric neonatology, an editor at the BMJ, and an internationally acknowledged expert on the life and works of the poet and philosopher James Beattie

Zealous yet modest; innocent, though free; Patient of toil; serene amidst alarms; Inflexible in faith; invincible in arms.

James Beattie 1735-1803, The Minstrel book 1 stanza 11

Roger Robinson's Oxford DPhil thesis was in animal physiology, notably the dynamics of production and movement of carbon dioxide between body compartments. His Aberdeen PhD, nearly four decades later, was on a poet and moral philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, James Beattie, four volumes of whose correspondence he published in 2001. He became an internationally acknowledged expert on Beattie's life and works and was made honorary fellow in English at Aberdeen.

Figure 1.

In between he was a neonatologist in the pioneering unit at Hammersmith Hospital headed by Sir Peter Tizard, a professor of paediatrics at Guy's Hospital Medical School, a leader in paediatric neurology, and an editor at the BMJ.

At Guy's he combined hands on general paediatric care with a one in three on-call rota for paediatric neurology. He was academic head and for several years administrative head of the department. He was "serene amidst alarms" with his care of children, "zealous yet modest" in his academic work, and "patient of toil" in administration. He was proud of his success in leading the negotiations for a children's hospital within the main hospital campus and for getting paediatric training in the community recognised so that it could count towards becoming a consultant.

After the first flush, his forte was not original research but his extraordinary gift for analysing the work of others. When evidence based medicine was but a dream, Roger's juniors learnt at his compulsory and compulsive journal clubs to distinguish fact from speculation. Indeed, almost without noticing, one of us (HM) was steered to a career in medical editing by the enthusiasm and fascination of Roger's critiques.

Throughout his professorial years he insisted on carrying a full clinical caseload. He was, to a degree, obsessional, and quoted this as a positive quality when applying for his chair. This led him to conducting full developmental assessments on his patients long after younger colleagues had delegated to others what they saw as a largely technical task. One result was that he did not publish extensively, partly also because he despised the "gift" and "ghost" authorship widely practised in academia—"innocent though free."

However, his interest in speech and language disorders led to a landmark review in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology ( 1991;33: 943-62), still extensively cited. This concluded that not only was there a variety of possible causes for specific speech and language disorders, but also that it seemed likely that more than one factor operated in the individual child with such a disorder. In the 1960s he published some of the earliest work on the assessment of gestational age in premature babies by defining their primitive reflexes, and was co-author of Medical Care of Newborn Babies; this Old Testament of British neonatology remained a gold standard for more than a decade.

His intellectual rigour—"inflexible in its faith" in science and logic—was later to benefit Archives of Disease in Childhood, which he edited from 1969 to 1982, and the BMJ, where he became an associate editor after he retired from Guy's aged 59. There he served as a valuable counterbalance to the wilder flights of fancy of his younger editorial colleagues. He gave the journal bottom, not to mention gravitas, further following the words of his hero Beattie: "Twas thus by the glare of false science betray'd/That leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind."

"Doing a Roger" came to mean reading a paper with great care and searching hard for its attributes. For a man reared on a diet of physiology and clinical science, Roger was remarkably open to qualitative research, decision analysis, and a host of previously unfamiliar methods—although he never developed a taste for economic evaluations. One of his legacies is "the sledgehammer to nut ratio" of a study, steering us away from the many studies where it was too high.

Whenever we got into a mess—as we did (and still do) often—we would ask Roger to investigate. He had a forensic ability to identify the essentials of a story, a highly developed sense of fairness, and remarkable judgment. Authors were always grateful to Roger—even when rejected.

Roger's final gift to the BMJ was to teach us how to die. With an equanimity that some of the younger staff found almost scary and surely born from his deep faith ("inflexible in faith") he told us of his prostate cancer and prognosis—and set about ordering his life. One of his priorities was to work on the final proofs of another Beattie book: he was anxious that somebody else might "correct" Beattie's characteristically wayward spelling. As he prepared for the operation from which he never recovered he said goodbye to us individually, assuring each of us of our worth.

And as to "invincible in arms," as a slightly built, bespectacled, bookish-looking undergraduate he was once berated by a colleague for wearing a Leander tie—until the colleague learnt that Roger rowed in the Balliol 1st VIII, which took Head of the River that year.

He leaves a wife, Jane; two sons and a daughter; and two grandchildren.

Roger James Robinson, emeritus professor of paediatrics United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas's Hospitals, London (b Parkstone, Dorset, 1932; q Oxford 1959; DPhil, DCH, FRCP, FRCPCH, PhD), d 12 October 2003.