Malcolm Milne, 22 May 1915 - 3 April 1991

Malcolm Milne was born on the 22 May 1915 at Woodley, Cheshire, the younger of the two sons of Alexander Milne, a pharmacist, and Clare Lilian ( née ). He went to Bradbury Council School and then to the Stockport School, where he was awarded a State Scholarship. These were highly competitive and coveted, since they covered the major costs of a university education. Therefore, he was enabled to enter Manchester University Medical School and in 1936 received first-class honours in his B.Sc. degree; subsequently in 1939 he also qualified M.B. Ch.B. This of course coincided with the start of the 1939-45 war, and after a short appointment as a house physician in the Manchester Royal Infirmary he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1940. His initial training was at Burghwallis in Yorkshire and then Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. Before joining the Eighth Army he married Mary Thorpe, the only daughter of Mathias and Annie Thorpe ( née Sykes) in June 1941. He then embarked on an adventurous army career which took him to Egypt, Libya, Tunisia (where in 1943, he was mentioned in dispatches), Italy and Austria. In short, the hardest of all routes to fulfil Churchill’s wish to attack ‘the soft underbelly of the Italo-German Axis’. Douglas Black (later knighted and President of the Royal College of Physicians), his old friend and colleague, tells me that he must have been the only medical officer in the Army, and almost certainly the only soldier, to take Hall’s Algebra to North Africa for his moments of leisure reading. He always had an interest in mathematics, and especially statistical methods, but clearly more as a stimulus or relaxation, since his subsequent career was not marked by much use of mathematics. If his early or subsequent influences had been epidemiological his story might have been different, but Bradford Hill and Doll had not yet made their impact on medical thought.