John Lloyd Burton

Although he spent his consultant career as a dermatologist, John Lloyd Burton had a very thorough training as a physician. He became increasingly widely known from the 1970s onwards through his writing—firstly for those studying for the membership examination of the Royal College of Physicians with Aids to Postgraduate Medicine , soon followed by Aids to Undergraduate Medicine , Aids to Medicine for Nurses , Aids to Medicine for Dental Students , and Essentials of Dermatology . In these slim texts John combined the essentials for understanding the subjects with an iconoclastic humour, such that the readers found that they could after all remember those lists that were needed to pass exams. John was born in Buxton, Derbyshire, and was the first in his family to go to a grammar school and then on to a university. He had a highly successful undergraduate career, obtaining many prizes and a BSc in physiology before moving through a series of prestigious junior posts in medicine—the professorial unit in Manchester, the Hammersmith, the Brompton, then Edinburgh—where he undertook cardiovascular research …