Sam Galbraith, Consultant Neurosurgeon in Glasgow and later an MP and a minister in both the United Kingdom and Scottish Parliaments, has died aged 68.
Born in 1945 in Clitheroe, Lancashire – a somewhat surprising fact he never seemed to mention – and the son of a joiner who became a teacher, Sam grew up in Greenock and went to the local school. He would later comment on the number of his classmates who he felt had equal intelligence but never had the breaks to enable them to do what de achieved. He excelled as a medical student at Glasgow University, gaining a first class honours BSc in Anatomy, and he graduated in 1971 with the Brunton medal for the most outstanding student of his year.
The interest in Neurosurgery he had developed as a student drew him to the Glasgow unit where Bryan Jennett was promoting the scientific and clinical culture which made the department a world leading academic environment. This suited Sam's talents perfectly. Experiences as a junior in general surgery had kindled an interest in head injuries, and within three years he published four papers in the Lancet and British Medical Journal. These showed that the policy at that time of admitting and observing thousands of head injured patients with no neurological abnormality and a normal skull X-ray was illogical, wasteful and ineffective. His work changed attitudes radically and was the foundation for the advances in management and improvement in outcomes which followed when CT scanning became available soon afterwards.
Sam gained his FRCS in 1975 and an MD for his work on Traumatic Intracranial haematoma two years later. In 1979 he was appointed Consultant in Glasgow at the unusually young age of 32. As a consultant Sam continued research in head injury, and joined in promoting the dissemination and adoption of the Glasgow Coma Scale. In 1983 he joined Bryan Jennet in revising the latter's popular texbook “An Introduction to Neurosurgery”. But he found his greatest fulfillment and enjoyment in caring for patients and training his juniors. Those fortunate enough to be trained by Sam will remember him as an outstanding technical surgeon, with economic, precise movements and an absolute minimum of fuss. His special interest lay in posterior circulation aneurysms. He was also a doctor in best sense: he cared for people with empathy and as equals, and he could raise serious topics but tinge their discussion with humour. An excellent teacher and an entertaining, iconoclastic lecturer, he was an ally to trainees in encouraging their development. The huge number of people whose career he influenced belies the fact that he only practised at consultant level for less than ten years, from 1979–1988.
Sam did not tolerate what he considered loose thinking: many will remember his voice - from the back of a lecture hall, X-ray meeting (no MDTs then), or SBNS session - cutting up their carefully-prepared talk or theory and throwing away the pieces. But it was never done with any hint of malice: this was the way science was meant to be, and he was perfectly happy to be treated in the same way. Few however had the opportunity, for it was unusual for Sam to be wrong.
One of his sayings was ‘work hard, play hard’; Sam did both with gusto and passion, working long hours clinically and academically during the week, and spending the weekends in his beloved mountains, climbing and skiing. Showing rather more aptitude for the former, Sam led expeditions in the Alps and later in the Himalayas. He said that his ambition there was to reach the top of an unscaled peak and call it Partick Hill.
From an early age on Sam was fired with a desire to level the inequalities in society. In the mid-1980s he became increasingly involved with the Labour party, and gained a national profile through his support for a pay claim for non medical staff, taking part in a demonstration for which he was docked half a day's salary. He spurned private practice, and on receiving a sizeable pay increase in 1983 donated 10 per cent of it to the NHS.
After almost a decade as a consultant he was seeking a new challenge and accepted an invitation to be the Labour candidate for the supposedly safe Tory seat of Bearsden and Strathkelvin. To his surprise as much as anybody's, in 1987 he was elected with a comfortable majority; he hadn't realised that that regulations would preclude his continuing as an NHS Consultant, and he had to leave full-time Neurosurgery in 1988.
It was while climbing, around 1986, that Sam began to feel the effects of the disease which was to change his life radically. His sister had a heart-lung transplant for fibrosing alveolitis in the early 1980s; Sam found himself getting more and more tired and breathless when climbing and running, and eventually had to admit that something might be wrong. He was diagnosed with the same (non-familial!) condition, and had an alarmingly rapid decline while awaiting a donor organ. He was probably weeks from death when he had a single-lung transplant – then a new operation – in Newcastle in 1990.
After some initial problems, his recovery was rapid, and though given only two to three years to live – the experience, sadly, of his sister – he continued to thrive on a cocktail of immunosuppressants and antibiotics, with only occasional admissions for infection. Typically he made light of his plight, and said that really the worst thing about a lung transplant was coughing up someone else's phlegm.
After a somewhat frustrating 10 years in opposition, after Labour came to power in 1997 he was a highly effective Minister for Health and the Arts in the Scottish Office and then held ministerial posts in the new devolved Scottish Executive before leaving politics in 2003. The directness of his contributions was legendary. Once he achieved the rare distinction of being reprimanded by the Speaker for telling an opposition orator that he was ‘talking bollocks’. Nevertheless the chairman of the British Medical Association’s Scottish council said that his great contribution as a minister had been to gain political acceptance of the links between poverty and ill health, hitherto resisted by governments.
Throughout all this he was supported by Nicola Tennant, whom he had met as a physiotherapist in the Institute and whom he married in 1987. Sam was a devoted husband to Nicola, and a superb, attentive father to Mhairi, who was a baby when he had his transplant, and subsequently to Heather and Fiona.
In Early July Sam attended a celebration in Glasgow of the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Coma Scale. His speech was as perceptive, incisive, witty and warm as ever. Only six weeks later, he developed a chest infection – not uncommon for him – but on this occasion it progressed rapidly, and he died in the Western Infirmary, Glasgow on 18th August 2014.
Sam was a man of many, many friends and few - if any - enemies. He was a truly inclusive and passionate politician, and a brilliant surgeon, teacher and academic. He was an extraordinary person and leaves a mountain of good memories. He was the embodiment of a powerful system of values, expressed in a selfless determination to do the right thing, together with an acceptance of fellow humans and a life long drive to make their lives better. Which he did many times over.
In an era before the familiarity now accorded to so-called celebrities, the name ‘Sam’ could only refer to one person.