My colleague and friend John Colley, who has died aged 92, was a pioneering epidemiologist and professor of public health medicine at Bristol University.
Born in Bath, John was the son of Alice (nee Nuttall), a nurse, and Richard Colley, an ophthalmic surgeon. From Kingswood school he went to St Thomas’ Hospital Medical School, London, graduating in 1955. He was among that early postwar cohort who expanded epidemiology to give it more dynamic clinical relevance. Their new measures of physical and mental function for use in population studies enabled research to show how illness and disease risk develop over long periods of life, and how ageing occurs.
