The passing of Cyril Clarke marks the end of the era of great medical all rounders. His career as a clinician ranged through life insurance practice, medical specialist in the navy, consultant physician, and later Professor of Medicine in Liverpool, and, finally, President of the Royal College of Physicians of London. His research contributions were equally broad based, spanning his classical work on mimicry in swallowtail butterflies to his enquiry into longevity by tracing and studying the lifestyles of centenarians who had received congratulatory messages from the Queen. He was one of the first in this country to appreciate that medical genetics, far from being a discipline which focuses on rare and esoteric diseases, has a major role to play across every aspect of day to day clinical practice. This led him to establish the Nuffield Unit of Medical Genetics in Liverpool, which became a stable for many who went on to develop this field throughout the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

But Cyril Clarke's most important contribution to medicine, and one that reflects his flair and willingness to chance his arm in problems which were often outside his field of expertise, was his inspiring leadership of the Liverpool team that discovered how to prevent rhesus haemolytic disease of the newborn, one of the major advances in preventive medicine of the last half century. This work typified his unwillingness to be deterred by the gloomy prognistications of experts in their fields, who often told him that his thinking was way off the mark, and his instinctive gift for what Peter Medawar called “the art of the possible”, reflected in his ability for sensing the quality of his younger colleagues and the science that they were pursuing.

Cyril Astley Clarke was born …