My husband, Dr Dilip Banerjee, who has died aged 84 from an aortic dissection, was a doctor and academic who spent his entire 34-year career in the UK at St George’s hospital in London. Both his brother and mother died from tuberculosis when he was six years old, and the eradication of this infectious disease became his lifelong professional focus.
As part of his scientific research on tuberculosis, he introduced genetic fingerprinting to map the epidemiology of tuberculosis in London in the 1990s, significantly improving “tracking and tracing” of the disease. The findings of his research dispelled the myth that the increased spread of tuberculosis in London was because of immigration, instead determining that imported tuberculosis was not spreading rampantly in the community. Long before our now pandemic-aware world began to value such issues, his research also highlighted the importance of primary healthcare and public health control measures. He was invited to write and speak internationally about his work.
Dilip was also renowned for his work on leprosy, which informed the subsequently internationally recognised triple therapy for the disease, thereby reducing leprosy-induced morbidity and disability.
He was born in Rajshahi, which was then in India and is now in Bangladesh, the son of Dinesh, a pharmacist, and Amiya (nee Mukherjee), a housewife. In 1946, after the deaths of his mother and brother, and shortly before the partition of India, he moved with his father and other relatives to Kolkata, India. He studied medicine at Calcutta National Medical College and was also assistant general secretary and then general secretary of the students’ union. He was one of the founders of Students Health Home in Kolkata, an organisation that provided free healthcare and medication to those in need and is still active today.
He graduated in 1958 and worked first in Kolkata, and then at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, where I was an assistant research officer. We met there and married in 1967, moving to the UK the following year for Dilip to take up a research post at St George’s, looking into leprosy mycobacteria.
Dilip’s career at St George’s went from strength to strength; he became a consultant microbiologist in 1980 and a university reader in medical microbiology in 1994. Epitomising the “holy trinity” of doctor, teacher and scientist/academic, he also led the undergraduate microbiology teaching and the clinical pathology training programmes at the medical school, and in 1985 published Microbiology of Infectious Diseases, a pocket book for medical students. In later years, he became chair of pathology services and clinical director of diagnostic services, as well as a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists.
Dilip was a gentle, generous, optimistic humanitarian who treated all those he came across with respect. An always-smiling husband and father, and a loyal friend, he loved travel, socialising, music, laughter, food and drink.
He is survived by me, our daughters, Shrilla and Shubha, and his grandchildren, Arun, Amiya and Dylan.
