Sir Gordon Wolstenholme, who has died aged 91, was internationally famous for exploring new ideas in medicine as the firmly independent director of the Ciba (now Novartis) Foundation for three decades. But this was just the main strand in an enormously productive involvement with medical organisations across all disciplines that continued for the rest of his life.
Its course was shaped by his experiences in the second world war. Born in Sheffield, Wolstenholme studied at Repton school, Derbyshire, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Middlesex Hospital Medical School. In 1939, he went into the Royal Army Medical Corps, where, because of his interest in haematology, he ended up directing the allied blood-transfusion services in the Mediterranean.
By 1944, he was commanding a military hospital in north Italy, responsible for all resuscitation services in the Mediterranean, while also overseeing the distribution and first large-scale use of penicillin in that region. Among his activities were training doctors serving with Tito's partisans and providing medical supplies to the various groups fighting in notoriously difficult terrain in Yugoslavia.
Through this work, he met his eventual second wife, Dushanka, a doctor who had trained in Belgrade. She went back behind the lines in Yugoslavia, medical and other supplies went on being dropped to the partisans and occasional letters were exchanged by precarious routes. With the war's end, this chance meeting was translated into marriage and a powerful peacetime partnership dedicated to fundamental medicine.
When he left the RAMC in 1947, Wolstenholme had thoughts of a life as a specialist in haematology. However, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Ciba decided to set up an independent centre in London to help repair the war-torn fabric of research in medicine and biology, partly because of British resistance to Nazi ideology and partly because under English trust law, alone in Europe, a charitable foundation of this kind has total independence from its sponsor.
However, it was realised from the outset that research and academic communities would be highly suspicious of commercial subsidy. The centre needed a director and trustees whose background, position and clout would dispel all doubts about freedom from parent-company influence, and set the new and relatively small enterprise on the same lines as the Nuffield or Wolfson foundations. When the Ciba Foundation opened its doors in 1949, Wolstenholme was behind the desk, with trustees including the proponent of the welfare state, Lord Beveridge, and the Nobel laureates Alexander, later Lord, Todd (chemistry, 1957) and Sir Howard Florey (medicine, 1945). But the greatest guarantee of independence came from the vigour, integrity and style of the foundation's activities.
Under Wolstenholme, the foundation set a pattern of cross-disciplinary, intensive and often controversial residential symposia. The pattern worked well because the number of worldwide participants was strictly limited, nobody could escape examination, and chairmen were chosen for their ability to probe and stimulate debate. The presentations and discussion sessions of each symposium were (and still are) edited and published rapidly.
Other centres used a closed symposium framework as a means of probing highly technical questions, but the small, highly intensive meeting was the brainchild of Wolstenholme and was developed under his guidance. Sometimes it was touched with humour, as at a symposium on extrasensory perception (set up under external pressure in the mid-1950s) when participants were surprised on their final day to find that some among their number were able to perform the mysterious feats they had come together to discuss. It turned out that these gifted individuals were professional magicians covertly hired by Wolstenholme to pep things up a bit. Not all participants were amused.
In any case, most meetings had more than enough pep. Wolstenholme's abilities as an organiser, administrator and fount of ideas were matched by his ability to act as a mediator and catalyst. He brought together scientists who, although matched intellectually, were separated by age, background and status, and would never normally have debated together.
Professor Abraham White, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, described Wolstenholme's Ciba Foundation meetings as a 20th-century version of a caravanserai, a gathering of travellers at an oasis where from dawn to dusk the time is spent matching ideas and intellects and engaging in pointed discussion. This is apt, for some symposia went east, to India or Malaysia for example, and although the early meetings concentrated on very narrow medical subjects, the range and breadth of the programme increased with time.
I n 1967, the theme of the 100th symposium was Health and Mankind. An eminent gathering heard Wolstenholme nail his colours and idealism to the mast. "Healthcare - a world health service - is an essential step toward man's wellbeing and toward a world society. If we cannot work together for the health of mankind we are rightly doomed," he declared.
Wolstenholme was somehow able, without evident effort, to manage simultaneously a dozen or more complex enterprises, for example working on the restructuring of medical care in Ethiopia (1963-74) and in Caracas, Venezuela (1969-78). When he retired from the Ciba Foundation in 1978, he moved, not into the country, but into the heart of London, where he would be close to the many medical and scientific organisations that he served. He was knighted in 1976, and in 1975-77 and 1978 was president of the Royal Society of Medicine.
In 1988, at the age of 75, he founded Action in International Medicine (Aim), which he chaired till 1995. It is an appalling waste, he would sometimes say, to pour money into costly hi-tech medicine and training to create specialist units in countries where communities lack even the simplest provisions for primary health care. Medicine must be structured upward from a broad community base, for it cannot be built soundly from the top down. Aim's work towards the goal of sensitive local primary and environmental health care in countries including the poorest continued until 2001.
Wolstenholme is survived by Dushanka, their two daughters, and a son and two daughters by his first marriage.
· Gordon Ethelbert Ward Wolstenholme, medical academic, born May 28 1913; died May 29 2004
· This obituary has been updated since the writer's death in 1998.
