John William McNee


Sir John William McNee FRSE DSO was a 20th century British pathologist and bacteriologist.

Life

He was born on 17 December 1887 in Mount Vernon in north Lanarkshire plus both the Bellahouston Gold Medal and John Hunter Gold Medal.
In the First World War he served as a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, being Mentioned in Dispatches. He did important work relating to both Trench fever and Gas gangrene, and on war nephritis and chlorine poisoning, receiving the Distinguished Service Order for his work. The research included probably the first autopsies of gas-poisoned soldiers on the battlefront. He was also awarded the Order of Aviz.
After the war he moved to University College Hospital in London, working under T. R. Elliot. In 1924 he obtained a Rockefeller Scholarship and went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, as an Assistant Professor studying coronary artery thrombosis, becoming an expert in this field. On his return to Britain he was offered the Chair in Practical Medicine at his alma mater of Glasgow University and accepted this.
In the Second World War he held the unique title of Surgeon Rear Admiral to the Royal Navy for Scotland and he Western Approaches. In 1939 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were John Walton, Thomas Murray MacRobert, Edward Hindle and George Barger.
He served as President of the British Medical Association in 1954.
He died on 26 January 1984 aged 96.

Family

In 1929 he married a medical researcher, Geraldine Le Bas. They had no children.

Publications