My father, Donald Singer, who has died aged 67 of a cardiac arrest, was a clinical academic who worked at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London for much of his career before moving to the University of Warwick as its founding professor of clinical pharmacology and therapeutics.
Donald was born in Forres, north-east of Inverness, to Isabel (nee Brown), a maths teacher, and her husband, Dennis Singer, a chemistry teacher. Part of Donald’s childhood was spent with his family in Iraq and Bahrain, where his father worked for a period as a lecturer at the technical centres of Iraq Petroleum and then Bahrain Petroleum. His secondary schooling took place back in Scotland, at Mackie Academy in Stonehaven, and then he did his medical training at the University of Aberdeen, where he met Fiona Carswell, a fellow student, in 1972. She became a languages teacher, and they married in 1978.
