Dr Tim Gimlette
Physician who made advances in the use of radioactive material for diagnosis and treatment
DR TIM GIMLETTE, who has died aged 95, was a pioneer of nuclear medicine (using radioactive “tracers” to diagnose and treat disease) and, as a junior Army doctor, worked at Berlin’s Spandau Prison, tending the last of the senior Nazis sentenced at the 1946 Nuremberg Trials.
Post-war Berlin suited Gimlette’s slightly mischievous nature. Although he would eventually be withdrawn in April 1953 (after “an unfortunate incident with a fire alarm”), in a memoir he recorded with wonder the city’s more bizarre aspects: the nightclubs, the black market, the bar girls (“beautiful but as hard as nails”) and the transvestites. Amid the devastation of the city, perhaps most incongruous of all were the comics. “I wish I’d learnt German,” Gimlette lamented. “They were clearly very funny.”
Although he was interested in all his patients, it was the Nazis he particularly remembered. For a year, he was part of the medical team looking after Spandau’s seven war criminals. It is possible he was one of last men alive to have known all these highranking Nazis, and in his memoirs they come across as a fractious and dysfunctional lot.
He knew Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, best, since Speer was the only one who spoke much English. Intelligent and beguiling, he was despised by his fellow prisoners for disavowing the cause.
Then there was Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who stood aloof from the others (“very stern,” Gimlette wrote, “and undoubtedly a formidable personality”). The rest were less impressive: Erich Raeder and Konstantin von Neurath were “very old”, Baldur von Schirach (head of the Hitler Youth), “bland”. Walther Funk, who had arranged the plunder of Jewish property, is not even mentioned.
Strangest of all was the Führer’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. He “was sunk in gloom beneath huge bushy eyebrows, uttering no word in any language”. Later it was claimed he was an imposter, because a welldocumented bullet wound could not be seen. Gimlette doubted the claim. Hess, he said, was one of the hairiest men he’d ever seen, and an old wound “would have been hard to find in that hairy pelt”.
Thomas Michael Desmond Gimlette was born on January 7 1927 in Wiesbaden, Germany, where his father, also a physician, was serving with the Army of Occupation. When the young Gimlette was two, the family moved to India, which he always loved despite everything – the dysentery, the marauding leopards, and nursery school, from which he was expelled for disobedience. He also had little time for his obligatory solar topee, or sun helmet, which he threw into the Suez Canal on the way home in April 1934.
Between these travels, there was an engaging, and often eccentric, array of relatives. His favourite was his grandfather, Surgeon Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Gimlette (who has been credited with inventing the gin and Rose’s lime juice cocktail, supposedly to ward off scurvy). The old admiral encouraged naughtiness, and, at lunchtime, the pair would pound each other with bread.
The next posting, Gibraltar, ended with an unforgettable voyage. In October 1939, aged 12, he was sent back to school, Epsom College, aboard RMS Montcalm. Although the ship had a full set of state rooms and 1,500 berths, there were only five other passengers aboard including an admiral, a colonel and an Australian naval commander.
For nine days they zigzagged up the Atlantic, wary of U-boats. But they all got on famously, playing deck quoits all day and, each evening, dining at the captain’s table (“Fried Sole, Roast Turkey and Peach Melba”). The colonel, who had commanded the Gibraltar batteries, was an affable soul and taught Gimlette knots and splices. When Liverpool eventually appeared, it was something of anticlimax, plunged in blackout.
From Epsom, Gimlette went up to Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, in 1944, aged 17. After two cold, rather bleak years, he proceeded to St Thomas’ Hospital to complete his medical studies. Following his stint in Germany on National Service with the RAMC, he returned to St Thomas’ in 1953 and by the end of the decade had developed an interest in the thyroid gland.
Appointed to run the Isotope Laboratory, Gimlette became increasingly involved in the use of radioisotopes for diagnostic purposes, a field later known as “nuclear medicine”.
In the face of establishment scepticism, he now found that pushing the boundaries paid off. It was a field of brilliant innovators, both physicians and physicists, including John Mallard (who helped to develop nuclear magnetic imaging) and Ian Donald (who, Gimlette said, “virtually invented the medical use of ultrasound”). In 1966, in the Prince Albert pub, Queensway, a group of them, including Gimlette, founded the British Nuclear Medicine Society or BNMS, now the professional body for more than 600 specialists.
The same year, Gimlette took up an appointment at the Liverpool Clinic, later moving into the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. In 1973 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the following year was elected president of the BNMS. Meanwhile, he delivered papers at international conferences from Rio to Sydney. His last paper, before he retired in 1989, was written for a Russian colleague, and, much to Gimlette’s amusement, it was published in the USSR with some of the illustrations upside down.
A man of modesty and humour, Gimlette maintained a wide circle of friends from all walks of life. In retirement, he indulged his enthusiasm for travel, painting and conservation. He leaves behind a wood in Cheshire, whose 2,000 trees he planted all by himself.
Tim Gimlette married, in 1957, Ruth Curwen, who predeceased him. He is survived by their daughter and three sons.