Dr John Bingham

Dr John Bingham

John Bedford Bingham was born in Bedford in 1944 and was given his middle name in recognition of the town of his birth. He always thought that this reflected his parents' sense of humour, which he inherited and which delighted his friend and colleagues. Working with John was always a pleasure. This made his death following a tragic accident all the more difficult to bear.

19 December 1944 to 13 October 2003

He started reading chemistry at Clare College, Cambridge but quickly changed his course to medicine for the very good reason that medics seemed to be having more fun. He was a clinical student at Guy's, where he qualified in medicine in 1969.After house officer posts at Guy's there followed a locum house officer in the renal unit, a daunting experience in those early days of renal transplantation. The he was a medical registrar, first at Guy's and then at Orpington Hospital, where he met Sheila Rankin, whom he was soon to marry. He intended to follow a career in general medicine but changed his plans under the guidance of Michael Maisey. At that time there was a rotating medical registrar post which included nuclear medicine as well as endocrinology. Initially, John was more interested in the thyroid and endocrinology but soon enjoyed the nuclear medicine even more. He turned out to be a natural for diagnostic imaging. He was very observant, careful, had an eye for detail and a superb all round clinical knowledge, At the end of the first year he said to Michael Maisey at the end of a reporting session could you stand another year of bad puns, an art at which he excelled!

In 1977, after 2 years of Nuclear medicine, John and Sheila went to the United States where John had a fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston working in cardiovascular nuclear medicine with Bill Strauss and Ken McKusick. He was offered a permanent post as associate professor, but, fortunately for radiology in the United Kingdom, the American immigration service saw it rather differently and refused to grant him a visa unless he returned home for two years first. They returned to UK in 1980. John decided that, only doing nuclear medicine, would be too limiting so he went to St Georges Hospital and trained in radiology. He sailed through all the exams first time and helped to set up nuclear cardiology there in his spare time. In 1985 he returned to Guys where his wife Sheila Rankin was already established as a radiology consultant. His main role was to set up the clinical service on the newly installed MRI machine. He went for a few months to train in Atlanta and returned to develop into one of the most respected clinical MR radiologists with an excellent local and national reputation. When the PET scanners were set up in 1992, John was very happy to be involved and particularly enjoyed the sessions when CT and MR would be reviewed together with the PET scans, as they reunited nuclear medicine with his radiology. He was very much looking forward to a greater role when the new PET/CT scanners were to be installed later this year

John Bingham was a dedicated teacher and loved to teach groups of medical students, radiology registrars and many others, including school children; he was the star attraction in the Summer school. To see him coaxing a, perhaps not too gifted person, through a CT or MR scan without getting irritated was a real pleasure; teaching by humiliation certainly was not John's style. It is because of this commitment to teaching that a John Bingham Memorial Fund has been set up by the Charitable Foundation of Guy's and St. Thomas' Hospital. Funds will be made available for training and education within the field of medical imaging for all grades of staff, medical and non medical as well as students.