Physician returned to nature after lifetime of healing
Professor John Lennard-Jones never lost his love of nature, despite a career spent working in a hospital environment.
He looked after a small menagerie of animals as a child and helped supplement the family diet growing vegetables during the austerity of the 1940s.
Lennard-Jones thought of becoming a farmer until called up for National Service where he worked as an orderly on a burns ward.
The experience changed the course of the 19 year-old’s life and he decided to study medicine.
‘LJ’, as he was known to his colleagues, went on to become one of the world’s leading gastroenterologists corresponding with ‘collaborators’ as far afield as Australia and New Zealand.
This included a medical fellowship allowing him crisscross America in a Greyhound bus talking to his counterparts about the latest thinking and treatments for inflammatory bowel disease.
He arrived at St Mark’s Hospital in 1965 and went on to become one of its most esteemed clinicians although he would have shrunk from the description remaining a modest approachable figure throughout his career.
Lennard-Jones remained a champion of the NHS and largely refused private practice believing the best care should be available to anyone in need.
He was the founder member of Crohns and Colitis UK, President of the British Gastroenterological Society, and sat on numerous committees.
He eventually returned to nature with his wife Vera settling in the Suffolk countryside after retirement. John Lennard-Jones passed away in 2019