Research writings of Dr. Ewart Geoffrey Walsh

The neurophysiologist Ewart Geoffrey Walsh was born in Cheltenham on 25 November 1922. He attended grammar school in the town after which a scholarship took him to Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Medicine. He graduated with the degree of B.A., with First Class Honours in Animal Physiology in 1943. He then spent two years as a Rockefeller student at Harvard, gaining an M.D., before returning to Oxford to graduate M.A., B.Sc., B.M. BCh. in 1947. He qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) in 1950, and the following year, in a move away from clinical medicine, he arrived at the University of Edinburgh as a Lecturer in the Department of Physiology. Until his elevation to Senior Lecturer in 1957, he also served as a part-time electro-encephalographer at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and thereafter, from 1957, an honorary consultant clinical neurophysiologist.

In 1959, Walsh became a Fellow of the Royal Society (Edinburgh), and in 1963-1964 he was a W.H.O. Visiting Professor at Baroda Medical College, India. In 1967 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London), and in 1968 a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh). From 1967 until 1990 he was Reader at the Department of Physiology, at Edinburgh.

Walsh collaborated widely and his work had a considerable influence on human neurophysiology and some of his work on tremor is still cited. In addition to numerous original papers, his publications were: The physiology of the nervous system (1957, and 1964); and, Muscles, masses and motion: the physiology of normality, hypotonicity, spasticity and rigidity (1992). He was an active member of the Physiological Society, serving on its committee from 1983 to 1986, and he had earlier served on the editorial board of the Journal of Physiology between 1965 and 1972. He also served on editorial board of Paraplegia from 1985 to 1991.

In 1991, he became Honorary Neurophysiological Specialist at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, and from 1997 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Central England, Birmingham.

Dr. Ewart Geoffrey Walsh died on 26 March 2003.