Douglas Montagu Temple Gairdner FRCP (19 November 1910 – 10 May 1992) was a Scottish paediatrician, research scientist, academic and author.
Gairdner was principally known for a number of research studies in neonatology at a time when that subject was being developed as perhaps the most rewarding application of basic physiology to patient care, and later his most important contributions as editor, firstly editing Recent Advances in Paediatrics, and then of Archives of Disease in Childhood for 15 years, turning the latter into an international journal of repute with its exemplary standards of content and presentation.
[3] He did his residency (house physician) in paediatrics at The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street in Bloomsbury, London in 1937-8.
[3][4] He became first assistant in the paediatric department at Newcastle where he began to work under Professor Sir James Calvert Spence in 1945.
[3] Gairdner also opposed unnecessary tonsillectomy, drawing attention to the risks of the operation at the time (1951)[10] and suggested more conservative ways of treating repeated respiratory infections.
[4] Gairdner's research interests included Schōnlein-Henoch purpura,[12] nephrotic syndrome, circumcision, and the formation of red blood cells in infancy.
[3][4] He received the Dawson Williams Prize[14] of the British Medical Association in 1978 for his creative editing of the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
[4] Gairdner loved to read and told of his wide-ranging interests in an article published by the British Medical Journal.
[5] He was described as a man with a strong sense of social responsibility who took politics seriously and a radical by temperament who "found it difficult to combine his feel for tradition with the need for change.