Professor Philip Poole-Wilson (National Heart and Lung Institute)

By Dr John Bell. Originally published in The Independent, Monday 16 March 2009.

Professor Philip Poole-Wilson: Cardiologist who modernised research into heart failure

Professor Philip Poole-Wilson died on 4 March. The day before, he would have read in Circulation, one of the most highly rated scientific cardiology journals in the world, a six-page article entitled: "Pioneer in Cardiology: Philip Poole-Wilson".*

Internationally, Poole-Wilson was one of the most respected, quoted and liked British cardiologists. His interests were broad. From early in his career he was determined to excel in research and teaching and to be an able clinical cardiologist.

Poole-Wilson held five visiting professorships, gave 39 named lectures, was an honorary member of 13 overseas societies of cardiology, and supervised 48 MD and PhD students (29 of whom went on to hold professorships).

He served on the boards of 31 journals and was a chair or member of the steering committee or monitoring board of 26 major drug trials. He was the author or co-author of 538 publications and edited, or contributed to, more than 100 books. He was head of cardiac medicine at the Royal Brompton, National Heart and Lung Hospital (1988) and at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London (1997). He was president of the European Society of Cardiology (1994-96) and head of the World Heart Federation (2003-05).

Poole-Wilson was born in London in 1943. His father, Denis, a colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps, shared a tent in Egypt during the Second World War with Dr Paul Wood, one of the fathers of modern British cardiology who was later to be a cardiac physician at the Brompton.

Denis Poole-Wilson went on to become an eminent urological surgeon in Manchester, establishing in the 1950s a pioneering screening for bladder cancer in dye workers. Poole-Wilson's mother was part French and a keen amateur racing driver.

As a scholar at Marlborough College, Poole-Wilson was an all-rounder. Excelling at games, especially rugby and cricket, he played for college teams. He won a major scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge to read natural sciences – physics, maths and physiology.

At Trinity he had many friends from different faculties and kept up his cricket and rugby. At an early dinner in Hall, discussion revolved around the meaning of the college motto, "semper eadem". Confidently, Poole-Wilson explained that it meant "keep smiling" – it actually translates as "always the same". Both epithets would describe his nature over the next 50 years.

For Part II Natural Sciences, Poole- Wilson read physiology, supervised sometimes by the Nobel Prize winner Dr Alan Hodgkin. At the end of his third year Poole-Wilson changed direction, to medicine, and he later went with an exhibition to St Thomas' Hospital Medical School where, in 1967, he qualified MB BChir.

While at St Thomas' as a house physician he married Mary Tattersall. Junior posts followed at the Brompton Hospital and the Hammersmith. In 1971 Poole-Wilson returned to St Thomas' as a registrar and the following year he joined the academic department of medicine. His early research interests at St Thomas' were based on the movement of chemicals across cell membranes.

He then moved into the biochemical bases for heart-muscle contraction. It was this research which led him into clinical cardiology. He won a British American Travelling Research Fellowship in 1973 and with Mary and their son went to UCLA in California. It was the start of a spectacularly successful career in academic cardiology.

Poole-Wilson's research at UCLA involved potassium and acid movements in heart muscle. This formed the basis for the work he continued on his return to the UK for a year at St Thomas'. Then, in 1976, he was appointed senior lecturer at the Cardiothoracic Institute and honorary consultant physician at the National Heart Hospital. In 1980 he was made reader and in 1982 given a chair by London University and in 1988 he became the Simon Marks and British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, at Imperial College.

During his first years at the NHLI he established a powerful reputation as a researcher and research supervisor.

He was a formidable debater, sometimes to be proven wrong but able to laugh at it. Out of his studies into biochemical abnormalities in heart failure, work with Dr George Sutton of Hillingdon Hospital produced a seminal paper concerned with the prevalence of heart failure in the community. This was instrumental in elevating heart failure, hitherto regarded as the end-stage consequence of a variety of cardiac insults, into a most important cause of illness in aging populations, with implications for healthcare worldwide. In 1998, Poole-Wilson was a founder member and the first chairman of the British Society for Heart Failure.

After serving the European Society of Cardiology as a councillor in 1988 and as secretary in 1990, Poole-Wilson was president from 1994 to 1996. Under Poole-Wilson the ESC, based in Nice, continued to enlarge and he undertook reorganisation, enabling easier co-operation of research across Europe. From 2003 to 2005 he was president of the World Heart Federation.

There, in a smaller organisation, he became interested in the prevalence of degenerative heart disease in developing countries and argued for increased recognition of a condition more important and prevalent than the infectious diseases which have held the lion's share of interest in third-world health.

Poole-Wilson had links throughout Asia and had returned from India a few days before his before his death. Throughout his career Poole-Wilson continued to practice clinical cardiology.

He received many honours, including the gold medal of the European Cardiac Society (1996); the Prix Europe et Médicine from L'Institut des Sciences de la Santé, Paris (2001); and the Mackenzie Medal of the British Cardiovascular Society (2007).

At his retirement dinner, which was held at the Royal College of Physicians in the autumn of 2008, Poole-Wilson suggested that he had never worked a day in his life. "Cardiology has been my hobby," he said. Although he retired from clinical practice at the age of 65, he intended to keep up his hobby in the UK and abroad as Emeritus Professor of Cardiology at Imperial College. At the time of his death he was supervising several higher-degree students and had a diary full of lectures and meetings worldwide, stretching into 2012.

Poole-Wilson was a yachtsman, and a gardener at his cottage in Wiltshire.

He will be sadly missed as a deep thinker, a promoter of productive research and a friend and counsellor for many.

Dr John Bell

Professor Philip A Poole-Wilson, MA, MD, FRCP, FESC, FACC, FMed Sci, Emeritus Professor of Cardiology, Imperial College, London. Born London 26 April 1943; married 1969 Mary Tattersall (two sons, one daughter); died 4 March 2009.