With the recent death of E J M (Moran) Campbell, respiratory medicine lost one of its most notable figures of the last 50 years. Moran Campbell graduated in medicine from the Middlesex Hospital London in 1949 following a career defining intercalated BSc in physiology. He then worked as a researcher and clinician at the Middlesex and later at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and Hammersmith Hospital, with a short period of research in the laboratory of R L Riley at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. In 1968 he emigrated to Canada to become the first chairman of the Department of Medicine in the new medical school at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. He retired in 1991 but continued to teach and to take an active interest in research until shortly before his death.

Campbell’s main research contributions were made when working in England in the 1950s and 1960s. His very readable memoirs¹ convey the excitement of clinical research at a time when scientific principles were gradually being applied to clinical medicine. His curiosity was stimulated by observations in patients with respiratory disease and his research was very much aimed at understanding and solving clinical problems. Of his three main research interests, his work on the respiratory muscles developed from questioning the therapeutic benefit of breathing exercises; he addressed the most distressing symptom experienced by patients with lung disease and, above all, he was driven by the practical need to understand and improve the management of respiratory failure. In all these areas his work remains highly relevant today.

Campbell strongly urged the integration of physiology into clinical medicine, co-editing with C J (John) Dickinson a very successful textbook² which did precisely that. He later ventured the view³ that “my good fortune in having the requisite grasp of physiology and sufficient …