Ian Donald CBE FRFPSGlas FRCOG FRCP (27 December 1910 – 19 June 1987) was an English physician who pioneered the diagnostic use of ultrasound in obstetrics, enabling the visual discovery of abnormalities during pregnancy.

[4] At the start of World War II, Donald was drafted into the Royal Air Force as a medical officer, where he developed an interest in radar and sonar.

[2] However, Donald never completed his education in Scotland, as the family moved to South Africa due to his father's poor health.

[13] Donald continued his secondary education at Diocesan College in Rondebosch, where he studied the classics, music, philosophy, and languages.

[4] At the end of his graduate education, Donald married Alix Mathilde de Chazal Richards,[4] a farmer's daughter from the Orange Free State.

[3] He was so successful in the role that he was mentioned in dispatches[3] for bravery after he pulled several airmen from a bomber that had crashed and had set on fire[2] while the bombs were in the airframe.

[16] By 1952, Donald and Young had built a new medical negative-pressure respirator that they demonstrated at a Physiological Society meeting in the Royal Free Hospital.

[1] Hetherington had to confirm the position with the Secretary of State for Scotland, as it was a government appointment and Donald was proud of his commission that was signed personally by the Queen.

[19] Whilst Donald was Professor of Regius Midwifery at Glasgow University, he first explored the use of obstetric ultrasound in the 1950s in a collaboration with John MacVicar, a registrar and obstetrician in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Western Infirmary, and Tom Brown, an industrial engineer who worked for Kelvin & Hughes Scientific Instrument Company, developed the first contact compound sector scanner,[2] and wrote an article in The Lancet: "Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound".

The patient's husband was the director of the boiler fabrication company Babcock and Wilcox, and he offered a tour of the plant to Donald, who accepted.

Donald's purpose in making the visit to Renfrew on 21 July 1955[22] was to determine if the industrial detecting equipment could be used to differentiate types of tissue.

[4] Donald experimented with the tissue samples along with a huge steak the company had provided for a control,[16] and determined that ultrasound could be used to scan biological material.

He obtained a Kelvin Hughes Mark lIb supersonic flaw detector from William Valentine Mayneord at the Royal Cancer Hospital.

[22] While Mayneord had been experimenting with the machine in an attempt to image the brain, he had been unsuccessful in his efforts; Donald hoped he could replicate and improve upon his previous success.

[2] In late 1956, Tom Brown, a research engineer with Kelvin & Hughes who had previously worked on an automatic flaw detector to test industrial products, became involved.

[27] Rankin offered to gift the latest Mk IV flaw detector, which was subsequently forwarded to Glasgow Central station from the Barkingside Labs location for delivery to Brown.

[32] Around that time, Edward Johnson Wayne of the Department of Medicine at the Western Infirmary had heard of Donald's research and was keen on a demonstration of the technique.

[32] Donald and MacVicar were pleased with the results from the machine and continued to experiment with how it could be used for diagnosis, but recognised that single dimension A-mode scanning was limited.

[34] Brown felt that the A-scope presentation was incompatible with the nature of the problem,[31] and that the image displayed did not correspond closely enough to the condition to enable a correct diagnosis.

[16] The A-mode scanner was moved to the Royal Maternity Hospital at Rottenrow where James Willocks, who joined the team in 1958, and Tom Duggan, a physicist hired by Donald in 1959, began to investigate fetal development with the instrument.

[40] Donald and McVicar also described the first successful diagnosis using obstetric ultrasound with the B-mode machine, which occurred when a woman patient was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the stomach using traditional clinical methods, palpation and by X-ray.

When it was at a 30° angle to the normal of the skin, sensed by what Brown described as "rather indelicate looking projections on either side of the ball", the motion was reversed and the gantry supporting the column moved about 15 mm, and the process was repeated.

[16] It was the only automatic scanner built due to funding problems and the complex nature of the machine, with regular maintenance needed to keep the valve electronics functional.

[16] In December 1959, Donald met with Slater at the Kelvin Hughes factory, who expressed a desire to withdraw due to the increasing and unmanageable costs;[43] the original £500 allocated to the project had stretched into thousands of pounds and the company could no longer afford it.

[43] The Trust sought assistance from the National Research Development Corporation in London, who provided them an immediate grant of £4,000[43] that was later supplemented with additional funding, up to £10,000 over several years.

[16] In 1959, Swedish obstetrician Bertil Sundén of Lund University, Sweden, visited Glasgow to find a subject for his MD thesis.

[47] Meanwhile, Donald noticed the very sharp echoes that were being produced at the sides of an infant's head, which led to the use of a hand-held probe and the A-mode scanner to detect the presentation of the fetus.

[47] James Willocks, a physician who worked with Donald in the same department at Rottenrow, undertook many hundreds of experiments using the new technique resulting in errors of less than 2% over 75% of cases.

[52][53] For much of his life, Donald suffered from valvular heart disease[21] as a result of him and his sister Margaret being infected with rheumatic fever when he was young.

[54] In the autumn of 1961, Donald collapsed in New York with atrial fibrillation, and he traveled back to the Western Infirmary for treatment with a mitral valve replacement.