Born: 16 September, 1947, in Birkenhead, Merseyside.
Died: 20 July, 2008, in Lanarkshire, aged 60. PROFESSOR Timothy Cooke was St Mungo professor of surgery in the University of Glasgow and clinical director of surgery and
honorary consultant surgeon at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
He was born in 1947 in Birkenhead and educated at the Birkenhead Institute. He spent a year with the international development charity VSO in Ghana before entering Liverpool University Medical School. He qualified with MB, ChB in 1973. After surgical training posts in Liverpool, his first academic appointment was as a research fellow in the university department of surgery at the Royal Liverpool Hospital in 1978. Here he developed an interest in the biology of individual breast cancers and subsequent patient outcome. The results of these studies were presented in his MD Thesis in 1980. His interest in the interrelationship between tumour biology and tumour behaviour and how this might be perturbed by treatment with benefit to individual patients remained a major driving force throughout his academic career. The resulting publications led to the award of a Hunterian professorship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
In 1980 he was appointed lecturer in surgery in the University of Southampton and subsequently, in 1983, he was promoted to senior lecturer and honorary consultant surgeon at the Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School in London. In both these posts he continued his academic work in breast cancer and extended his research into the field of colorectal malignancy.
In 1986, Cooke returned to the Royal Liverpool Hospital, again as senior lecturer in surgery and honorary consultant surgeon. This gave him the opportunity to work once more with Professor Sir Bob Shields, whose influence proved seminal and long-lasting. While he never lost sight of the pivotal role of surgery in cancer management he was one of the first surgeons to recognise the need to integrate all the various disciplines within cancer medicine to optimise patient care.
By 1989 he had a significant reputation in academic surgery and had published extensively on breast and colon cancer. At this point Cooke was ready to lead an academic department and, despite other opportunities in the UK and overseas, he moved to Scotland. In April 1989, he was appointed to the St Mungo chair of surgery in the University of Glasgow.
Cooke was an outstanding academic surgeon with international recognition. Although he undertook and supervised extensive laboratory research in breast and colorectal cancer, it was always directed towards the clinical management of patients. His early work on oestrogen receptors paved the way for the logical use of hormone therapy in breast cancer patients. Using a similar pattern of enquiry he supervised research into the significance of Her1-4 positivity in breast cancer, which contributed to the widespread usage of Herceptin in the UK for Her2-positive patients.
In all, he published nearly 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and numerous books and chapters. His academic stature allowed him to take his place on virtually all the UK's leading cancer funding and guiding committees and he was a member of at least seven editorial boards.
Throughout his senior career, Cooke was heavily involved with teaching future generations of doctors. He supervised 25 higher degrees by thesis and was an undergraduate and postgraduate examiner for 13 universities, many of which were overseas. He believed fervently that learning was best done through self- enquiry. He fought strongly to bring Glasgow into the vanguard of medical schools to introduce problem-based learning into the undergraduate curriculum in the UK and played a leading role in curriculum development. At postgraduate level he was an enthusiastic trainer of young surgeons and an active member of the West of Scotland Postgraduate Surgical Training Committee for many years.
In addition to his considerable academic activity, Cooke played a major role in NHS medical management, particularly leading the provision and development of breast services and surgical oncology in Greater Glasgow. He was associate medical director of surgery and anaesthetics for Glasgow, a vital job at a time when hospital services within Greater Glasgow were undergoing a major reconfiguration. This post required vision, tact and tenacity, all qualities Cooke had in abundance.
For all his academic and managerial commitments Cooke remained a clinician at heart. He never allowed one to forget the important contribution to cancer cure made by the surgeon. His presence in the outpatient clinic and operating theatre was a source of reassurance and inspiration to his clinical team. Indeed, he was a team player, being one of the first cancer surgeons to implement the method of multidisciplinary team working, a practice now regarded as mandatory in cancer management.
With all his professional activity one might suppose Cooke had no time for a private life but this would be a serious underestimation. He was a bon viveur, a sportsman, an intellectual and, above all, a family man. He enjoyed racquet sports, completed the London and Liverpool marathons, sailed, rode, skied and wore out several mountain bikes and many friends cycling around the Scottish hills. He was a lifelong devotee of Liverpool Football Club and could recall every game from their glory days of the 1970s and 1980s, when he was a regular at the Kop.
He read avidly. Having attended the same secondary college as Wilfred Owen, he was particularly knowledgeable about his poetry and shared the same anti-war sentiment. One of his more recent joys was playing the saxophone, which he took up aged 50, and he delighted in demonstrating his skills to anyone who would listen.
Tim Cooke is survived by his wife, Lynn, a consultant ENT surgeon, and their three daughters and three sons.
The full article contains 954 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
