James William Brown

James William Brown FRCP (1897–1958) was an English physician, pathologist, and cardiologist. [3]

As a Quaker educated at the Society of Friends School at Sidcot, he served with a Friends Ambulance Unit in France from 1916 to 1919, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1917 for evacuating six wounded soldiers under heavy fire.[2]

After demobilisation he entered the Middlesex Hospital Medical School and qualified MRCS, LRCP in 1923. He graduated MB BS (Lond.) in 1924 and MD (Lond.) in 1928.[1] In 1924 he joined the general practice of Joshua Williamson (b. 1874), who was a general practitioner and also held an appointment as honorary surgeon to Grimsby Hospital.[2][4] At the Grimsby Hospital, Brown became honorary pathologist and then honorary physician.[2] He qualified MRCP in 1930 and was elected FRCP in 1942. He was a general practitioner, in partnership with Williamson (who became his father-in-law), at Cleethorpes from 1924 to 1931 and at Grimsby from 1931 to 1938.[1] In 1938 he abandoned general practice[2] to become a consultant physician, and later cardiologist, to the Grimsby Hospital and the Scunthorpe General Hospital.

In 1930 he joined David Clark Muir in running a paediatric heart clinic at Hull. The clinic developed into a referral centre for congenital heart disease.[5] Brown wrote with Evan Bedford the section on congenital heart disease in volume 6 of the British Encyclopaedia of Medical Practice (1937, London, Butterworth & Co., Ltd.). Brown's book Congenital Heart Disease (1939) was of some importance in the development of cardiac surgery. In 1943 he gave the Bradshaw Lecture. He was a member of the editorial board of the British Heart Journal.[2]

In Grimsby in 1925 Brown married Margaret J. Williamson. They had a son and a daughter.[2]