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Accessibility Links Skip to content Search The Times and The Sunday Times Listen free to Times Radio You are reading this article for free. Enjoy unlimited articles, free for one month. View offer Professor Hubert Webb Pioneering neurovirologist at St Thomas’s hospital whose of his achievement in medicine was very great Tuesday February 22 2011, 12.01am, The Times Professor H.E. Webb Professor H.E. Webb Share

Professor Hubert (”Hughie”) Webb was a pioneering neurovirologist at St Thomas’ Hospital, London.

Born in 1927 in India, where his father was serving in the Indian Political Service, Hughie was six when he first came to England. After preparatory school he went to Winchester College, where he thrived and where his brilliance in games led to an extraordinary adventure.

In Webb’s last summer term, in 1945, Field Marshal Montgomery came to Winchester to see his son David, and was so impressed by Hughie’s captaincy of the cricket team in its annual match against Eton that he invited the two boys to his HQ in occupied Germany. They were driven from the War Office to Northolt in a Rolls Royce, flew across the Channel in an Anson, stayed in Monty’s magnificent Schloss, had a sailing trip to Denmark in Monty’s own yacht, and were taken to Berlin with him, where they met the Russian General who had led the attack on Hitler’s Chancellery.

A candid and fascinating account of these eleven days written by Webb in an exercise book was recently published, unexpurgated, as Hughie Webb’s Journal, with marvellous photographs and memorabilia (available from the Imperial War Museum).

From Winchester Webb went to New College, Oxford, to study medicine — his lifetime ambition. He also found time to have an outstanding sporting career too. At a Commem Ball his partner asked him to introduce her to another chap there, who had a Blue in football, as she had “always wanted to dance with a Blue”. What she did not know, and Webb was too modest to tell her, was that she was already dancing with a quadruple Blue. He had them in golf, cricket, squash and racquets, and would have gained a fifth, in tennis, if it had not clashed with cricket. Advertisement

Among his many cricketing triumphs at Oxford were scoring 145 not out against Cambridge and a century against the MCC at Lord’s. In later life he won the International Tennis Federation’s Dubler Cup for men in the 45 age category (1972), and remained a formidable games-player into his seventies. Although the kindest and most caring of men, Webb was intensely competitive, and the same determination to succeed and defeat the opponent in sport was equally apparent in his unremitting battles against disease, both as physician and as scientist.

From Oxford he won a scholarship to St Thomas’ Hospital, London, in 1948, in the same month that his future wife started nursing there. They were married in 1950, and in 2010 they celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary.

Webb qualified as a doctor in 1951, and after a couple of years doing house jobs at St Thomas’s and gaining his MRCP, he had to do his National Service. Not wishing to be parted from his family, which by now included two tiny children, he signed on for a four-year short-service commission in the RAMC, which meant that he could take his family with him to any posting. He was sent to Singapore, in the middle of the Malayan emergency, and it was there that he developed his interest in neurovirology, the field of medicine to which he was to make such an outstanding contribution.

Among the many diseases he confronted in Malaya was a devastating tick-borne encephalitis that was decimating British troops and native children but not, strangely, native adults, who, Webb realised, had somehow developed a high degree of immunity that would be the key to prevention and cure.

His success with this disease then brought an invitation for his secondment to the American Walter Reed foundation in Kuala Lumpur, and this in turn led to his joining the Rockefeller Foundation’s new viral research institute in Poona, in the country of his birth.

In India Webb found himself confronting another extraordinary epidemic of a deadly disease. This was Kyasanur forest disease (KFD), and it was not just humans who were affected. Monkeys, squirrels and birds were literally dropping dead out of the trees. The closest parallel was far away, in Russia, but Webb suspected and proved a direct connection, the virus being carried by the ticks on migrating birds. He then found the cure.

In 1958, despite a tempting offer from the Rockefeller Foundation, Webb returned to England and to St Thomas’s, where he would spend the remainder of his career — progressing from registrar in neurology to consultant, and ultimately to Professor of Neurovirology (1988).

On his return to England he submitted a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Medicine based on his research on KFD at Poona, but this was not plain sailing. First, the Dean of the Faculty refused to believe that he had done this work. Then there was the problem of finding someone qualified to examine it, as Webb was himself the world expert. Advertisement

He ran his own research unit in the hospital, and in 1990 the University of London recognised his distinction with the award of a doctorate of science. His reputation in his field was international, and he travelled sharing knowledge and everywhere gaining good friends and collaborators. In a letter of condolence to his widow the president of the Association of British Neurologists wrote: “All neurologists remember Hughie and his many contributions in the area of viruses in the central nervous system, and in developing ideas on viral causes for cancer that were far ahead of his time.”

Webb was a great pioneer, always ready to stray from the beaten track of conventional wisdom and scientific fashion. The present generation of researchers in his field is deeply in his debt, and not least among his discoveries is a revolutionary theory of the cause of multiple sclerosis that may well lead to a cure for this disease.

But distinguished as he was in research, Webb was not confined to the laboratory. He was above all a brilliant hands-on clinician and physician. For 30 years he was also the personal physician — the GP — to his hospital’s Nightingale Nurses. He loved this role, and the nurses loved having such a delightful, approachable and wise doctor and confidant. When he retired, he was made an Honorary Nightingale.

Webb’s life was a rich and useful one. The scale of his achievement in medicine was immense and continuing, both through those he taught (for he was an inspiring teacher) and through his brilliant research; and if he had not been so devoted to medicine he could have been a professional in all five sports in which he excelled.

Yet he was the most modest as well as the kindest of men, and is remembered with affection by all who knew him or came under his care.

He is survived by his wife, Jean, and by their two children.