- Rebecca Wallersteiner
- London
- wallersteiner{at}hotmail.com
Patrick Vaughan overcame a delayed education and dysfunctional childhood to make a major contribution to international health through his work at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Much of his career in epidemiology was spent working in low and middle income countries. He served with government health services in Papua New Guinea (PNG); helped start a medical school at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and spent three years researching diarrhoea in Bangladesh. In 1985 he was among those consulted by the organisers of Live Aid on how best to spend the estimated £150m raised by the UK and US concerts.
He authored more than 120 academic papers and 22 books over his career. As a lockdown project he co-edited Practical Epidemiology: Using Epidemiology to Support Primary Health Care (2021) with Cesar Victora and Mushtaque Chowdhury, both of whom he had mentored when they were doctoral students.
John Patrick Vaughan was born in Penzance, Cornwall, in 1937, the only child of Ellaline (née Norwood) and Thomas Gerald Vaughan, an erratic investor and conscientious objector in the second world war. After the early death of his brother, Gerald spent all his inheritance, leading to bankruptcy.
A few months after Patrick’s birth, the family left Cornwall and joined an Anabaptist Cotswold …
