Bull, James William Douglas

Born in Buckinghamshire. Educated at Dumpton House preparatory school, Repton and Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.

Student at St George's in 1932. Worked at St George's as casualty officer, house surgeon, house physician, assistant curator of the pathology museum, and medical registrar.Specialised in radiology and, supported by Wylie McKissock, won a Rockefeller travelling fellowship to Sweden in 1938, to study the new techniques of neuroradiology under Erik Lysholm at the Seraphimer Hospital in Stockholm.

Radiologist at Maida Vale Hospital in 1939. During the Second World War worked at a head injury hospital in Oxford, and in Singapore. After the war he returned to Stockholm, and in 1946 was appointed to the staff at St George’s, where he worked at the Atkinson Morley as neuroradiologist for Wylie McKissock. In 1947 he joined Hugh Davis at the National Hospitals for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square. From Sweden, he brought back the technique of percutaneous angiography, and experimented with vertebral angiography by 1950. He also initiated Myodil ventriculography, and introduced radionuclide brain scanning to the UK from the United States.

Member of the councils of both the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal College of Surgeons, foundation president of the British Society of Neuroradiologists, president of the European Society.

Married Edith Burch in 1940. Died of brain injury following a car accident in 1987.

Royal College of Physicians