PAUL WOOD
M. Campbell · Heart · 1962
Paul Hamilton Wood, the second son of R. B. Wood of the Indian Civil Service, was born at Coonoor in India on August 16, 1907 and died on July 13, 1962, aged 54 years.He went to school in Kent till he was 12 or 13, when his father who was only 45 decided to retire from India and take up fruit farming in Tasmania.Here Paul developed his love of the country and of hard physical work on the farm, and of intellectual pursuits at the Launceston Grammar School, where he did well.He read medicine at Melbourne University and graduated M.B., B.S., in 1931.He was a versatile athlete, representing his school at most sports and winning his colours for rugby at the university where he was chosen for the combined Australian Universities side, and later in New Zealand he won cups for skiing.His academic career at Melbourne was not as consistently brilliant as it was to be later, for though he passed with distinction in surgery and obstetrics, he failed in medicine the first time and was allowed to leave without doing house appointments.He held these positions at the Christchurch General Hospital, New Zealand, where his ability and wide knowledge soon became recognised.Here he met Elizabeth, daughter of John Guthrie, M.S., the senior surgeon.In the latter part of 1934 when he had obtained the M.R.C.P. (London) and was finishing his appointment at the Heart Hospital, he wrote asking her to come to England to marry him.This she did and they were married just after Christmas that year.Paul Wood had come to England in 1933 and soon became H.P. at the Brompton Hospital.Had there been a vacancy at the National Hospital, Queen Square just after this, he would probably have applied for this, since neurology then appealed to him as an exact medical discipline that would satisfy his liking for the platonic form of diagnostic reasoning.He was, however, appointed R.M.O. at the National Heart Hospital in 1934.Only a few weeks passed before his knowledge and industry and his keen, logical, incisive mind made such an impression on the medical staff that they were saying to each other that he would have to be their next colleague.It was, in fact, only three years before he was appointed Physician to the National Heart Hospital in 1937.In 1935, when the Postgraduate Medical School was founded, he had been asked by Professor F. R. Fraser to join their staff and was given full clinical and teaching responsibility at the age of 27.His early work was on the chest leads in clinical electrocardiography.In 1937 he wrote on their standards in normal subjects and in 1939 on their value in many clinical conditions.He served on the joint British and American committee for deciding the best methods of using them, and if he had had his way the British committee would have agreed to recommend the use of multiple chest leads in 1938.This work was continued in 1949 by an important paper on cardiac infarction and bundle-branch block.Soon after the outbreak of war, Wood was investigating effort syndrome in soldiers and firmly established this as a psychiatric disorder.He made this the subject of his Goulstonian Lecture in 1941 on Da Costa's syndrome.Later he joined the R.A.M.C. and served in North Africa and Italy: he became Consulting Physician, Central Mediterranean Force, with the rank of Brigadier and was awarded the O.B.E. and mentioned in despatches; but seems to have been little changed while serving in the army.In 1945 at a conference of army physicians in Rome, he spoke about the importance of foreign bodies in or near the pericardium in producing recurrent attacks of pericarditis.He had written about the cardiographic changes in pericardial lesions and stab wounds of the heart in 1937.