Children followed distinguished doctor into medical careers
Sir Dugald Baird
Regius Professor of Midwifery
FEW families have made such a significant contribution to the NHS in Scotland as the Bairds.
In 2020, NHS Grampian will open the new Baird Family Hospital in honour of Sir Duguld and Lady Matilda Baird and two of their children, Joyce and David.
The facility, adjacent Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital, will encompass maternity, gynaecology, breast screening and breast surgery services, as well as a neonatal unit, centre for reproductive medicine, an operating theatre suite and research and teaching facilities.
Sir Dugald was born in Greenock and studied medicine at Glasgow University, where he graduated in 1922. As a student and young doctor in Glasgow he saw the effects of poverty on mothers and babies and this influenced his lifelong interest in socioeconomic factors in health and disease.
In 1937 he was appointed Regius Professor of Midwifery in Aberdeen and spent the next three decades shaping policy on reproductive health, perinatal and maternal mortality, social obstetrics and cervical screening.
He and Lady Baird, also a physician, established the first free family planning clinic in Aberdeen. In 1951 he started the Aberdeen Maternity and Neonatal Databank, linking all obstetric and fertility-related events in women from a defined population. Sir Dugald retired in 1965 and died in 1986; Lady Baird died in 1983.
Their daughter, Joyce Baird, was also an internationally acclaimed physician and scientist, specialising in diabetes at the Western General in Edinburgh. She died in 2014 aged 85.
Their son, Professor David Tennent Baird, 82, held the chair of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Edinburgh University and has served as a expert in human reproductive biology for the World Health Organisation. He developed antiprogesterone pills, used worldwide for contraception, as well as the treatment of conditions such as fibroids.