My friend Dan Tunstall Pedoe, who has died aged 75, was a cardiologist who invented the non-invasive diagnosis of certain heart conditions and was a pioneer in sports medicine as the founding chief medical officer of the London Marathon.
Dan and his twin brother, Hugh, were born in Southampton, to Daniel Pedoe, a mathematician and geometer, and Mary Tunstall, a geography lecturer. The family moved to Birmingham, and then, when the twins were eight, to London, occasionally spending the summers with their parents in the US, Singapore and Sudan. Dan studied in London at Haberdashers’ Aske’s, then in Hampstead, and Dulwich college.
He and Hugh attended King’s College, Cambridge, together, then Dan studied at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London and earned a PhD at Wolfson College, Oxford, studying measurement of blood flow in the heart, a technique he later developed with international collaborators into a non-invasive diagnostic measurement using ultrasound and the Doppler principle. Dan met Robin Shankland in 1965, when she was his nurse treating him for a tooth abscess he had developed in India. They married in 1968, and lived in Oxford, then for a year in San Francisco, before settling in Hackney, east London, where they remained.
Dan began working at Hackney hospital in 1973 as a cardiologist and general physician. He expanded the cardiology unit into a thriving department, where he developed novel techniques for using ultrasound to measure blood velocity and thereby make diagnosis safer and less invasive. He was chief of the commissioning team for the new Homerton University hospital, and later chaired the hospital’s art committee, bringing modern works to its walls.
Dan was an avid runner, competing for Cambridge and Barts as well as with the Orion Harriers. His enthusiasm and his heart expertise made him the natural choice to be appointed as chief medical officer of the London Marathon for its first running, in 1981. He kept the position for 27 years, expanding the medical team from one doctor to 36 while maintaining an impressive safety record.
Dan encouraged people who were not highly trained athletes to participate, and established principles to keep them safe that have been adopted internationally. He shared his unparalleled knowledge of marathon medicine by editing an influential book summarising research, Marathon Medicine (2000). A pioneer in sports medicine, he gained funding to start the first sports medicine institute in London, at Barts.
When he wasn’t running outdoors, he was often moving more slowly, camera in hand, photographing insects and birds with beautiful technique. He exhibited his works, and some can still be seen in Hackney health centres. After he retired, Dan continued to enjoy the outdoors.
Robin died in 2014. Dan is survived by Hugh, his children, Nadine, Simon and Ian, and by three granddaughters.
