My colleague and friend Richard Morton, who has died aged 84, was a pioneering medical photographer who believed in embracing technology to understand, visualise and document health and disease.
Born in London, the son of Robert Morton, an optician, and Constance (nee Beavers), a housewife, he went to the progressive Sherwood school in Epsom, Surrey, set up on the model pioneered by AS Neill. He then attended Regent Street Polytechnic, graduating in general photography with further study at the London School of Medical Photography. In 1957 he joined the medical photography and illustration department at Westminster hospital, as a photographer, rising to become deputy to the department director, Dr Peter Hansell.
In 1970 he moved to Aberdeen University, where he was director of medical illustration at the medical school until 1984, adapting to the different systems of education and heath board practice in Scotland. He also completed a research MSc in 1979, investigating the optimal recording of endoscope imaging photography.
The period from late 60s to the mid 70s was one of rapid change for medical illustration in the UK. The founding of the Institute of Medical Illustrators in Scotland, in 1967, and the Institute of Medical and Biological Illustration in England, in 1970, brought together medical artists, graphic designers, medical photographers and audio-visual technologists, with increasing collaboration. The two bodies joined together in 1975 (and were renamed the Institute of Medical Illustrators in 1989).
The BMA journal Medical and Biological Illustration became the official scientific journal for the combined profession in 1968; Richard was editor from 1976 to 1981 – the publication by then known as Journal of Audiovisual Media in Medicine.
In 1993 he became professor and department director at the University of Wales College of Medicine. Between the Aberdeen and Cardiff posts, he ran the Graves Medical Audiovisual Library and set up the National Medical Slide Bank. He edited the second edition of Photography for the Scientist (1984), co-authored A Colour Atlas of Cardio-pulmonary Resuscitation Techniques (1986), and contributed more than 20 papers to medical journals.
He was made fellow and later honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, gaining its Combined Royal Colleges medal in 1987, and in 1980 he received the Norman K Harrison gold medal from the Institute of Medical Illustrators.
Earlier in life he was on the first London to Aldermaston march in 1958, in the very early days of CND. In retirement in Haddington, near Edinburgh, he served as course leader of the East Lothian University of the Third Age and founded a table tennis club for the town - the largest in Scotland. Diagnosed with a life-curtailing illness eight years ago, he latterly spent many happy hours in the restoration of the Amisfield Walled Garden in Haddington.
He approached life with dedication to family and friends and a sense of humour. He is survived by his wife, Estelle (nee Levear), whom he married in 1960, and their five children, Matthew, Sarah, Francisca, Daniel and Gregory, and seven grandchildren.
