Birth of a new perspective

In August, medicine lost one of its towering figures — a man whose work on maternal nutrition had led to the conclusion that what happens to us in the womb is the most important determinant of our health in middle and old-age.

Prof David Barker was born in 1938 and evacuated to Hertfordshire, in the English countryside, during the bombing blitz on London. After training in medicine, he studied epidemiology (disease patterns).

While working in Southampton, he studied why poorer people in the north of England were more likely to die early of heart disease than their wealthier peers in the south. Premature heart disease and stroke were prevalent in large industrial towns in the north, like Bolton and Preston, where infant mortality had been most common in the early part of the 20th century.