Lifetime Achievement Awards
Professor John Pepper
John Pepper Lifetime Achievement
John Pepper was born into a naval family in the city of Plymouth. In what might well have augured a lifetime of significant contribution to the management of cardiothoracic disease, his father developed tuberculosis shortly before John was born. In those days, of course, tuberculosis was managed in one of the sanatoria that have become the cardiothoracic units in which many of us now work. When a mere toddler, his mother moved the family to Surrey and John would often be left with his maternal grandfather, a general practitioner of Swiss-German extraction, while his mother travelled to Aberdeen to spend a week with her husband confined, as he was, to the Toma Dee sanatorium.
School in Surrey led to what John, with characteristic modesty, claims to have been a ‘lucky admission’ to Clare College, Cambridge in 1965. Cambridge was followed by a scholarship to embark upon clinical training at Guy’s Hospital Medical School and graduation as a doctor in 1971. John completed the bulk of his general surgical training in Leeds, the epicentre of GI surgery in the UK at the time. He was admitted to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1975 and embarked on specialist training in cardiothoracic surgery. He was variously SHO to Donald Ross at Guy’s Hospital, registrar at the National Heart and London Chest Hospitals, before being appointed to the Guy’s, St Thomas’s, Brook senior registrar rotation.
At an improbably young age, John was appointed consultant at the London Chest Hospital; his workload encompassed adult cardiac surgery but also an extensive thoracic practice including oesophageal as well as pulmonary surgery and a weekly endoscopy list at Southend General Hospital. John’s lifetime commitment to research and training became evident at this early stage in his career: he completed a research project on myocardial protection using this stuff called cardioplegia, a novelty at the time; developed an animal model of lung transplantation, organised symposia for the annual Cardiac Surgery Course at the Cardiothoracic Institute and gave lectures to local general practitioners.
In 1982, John Parker was looking for a colleague with whom to expand the cardiothoracic surgery programme at St George’s Hospital, which had just decamped from Hyde Park Corner to its current home in Tooting. Those who knew Parker know that he had a shrewd eye for identifying talent and could be very persuasive and so John duly moved to Tooting. Over a period of ten years, the unit expanded prodigiously, the research output, with cardiological luminaries such as Michael Davies and John Camm and David Ward was stellar and, for a decade or so, cardiac surgery at St George’s was ‘Parker and Pepper’.
John was intimately involved in every aspect of the department, but his energy, passion for innovation and technical skill were perhaps best exemplified by the establishment of a cardiothoracic transplantation programme, something that he accomplished entirely single-handedly without central funding.
As a young registrar, I well recall meeting John at the somewhat surreal party that is multi-organ retrieval. In those days, John would drive to the donor hospital in his white VW Golf GTi, retrieve the heart-lung bloc, divide the bloc and distribute the organs accordingly, before racing back to St George’s to implant the heart and spend most of the next several weeks managing every detail of the patient’s subsequent recovery.
In 1991, when Magdi Yacoub was appointed to the Chair in Cardiac Surgery at the National Heart and Lung Institute, John was persuaded to join him as Senior Lecturer. There were some who wondered why an established consultant, already a senior figure in our specialty, would want to take what, in those days, was seen by some as a step sideways, but they don’t know John.
Ego wouldn’t have featured in that calculation; John would have seen only the opportunities to learn more about our specialty, to contribute to the training of future generations and participate in something exciting. At the Brompton, John had an exceptionally busy practice, always putting patients front and centre, training the young, conducting and supervising research, developing new surgical procedures, and raising more than £8m in grants. He became a Reader in 1995 and a full Professor at Imperial College in 1999.
The procedure most recently associated with John’s name is the PEARS (Personalised External Aortic Root Support), inspired by and developed in conjunction with a patient on whom John had operated. The enthusiasm with which John has travelled the world proctoring others in the use of device is matched only by the modesty and self-effacement that he exhibits when responding to others laying claim to have been responsible for accomplishments that were in reality his.
He was awarded the Tudor Edwards medal by this society in 2015 and, in the same year, was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. John has held countless executive positions in learned societies, been a member of the editorial boards of most of the high-impact journals in our specialty and held honorary positions in hospitals and medical schools around the world. He is one of the most cited authors in the field of aortic surgery.
John is a man of irrepressible good humour and enthusiasm, and I have never seen either desert him. He is a man of exceptional modesty and self-effacement who understood, more than anyone I have met, the need to lead by example; as his registrar, I well remember him taking up a mop to clean theatres in between cases when the rest of us could think only of sloping off for lunch. Confronted by such an example of leadership, even I had to give serious consideration to skipping lunch.
Of the many qualities that John possesses, if I were pressed to single out one, it would be his innate and unshakeable sense of fairness exemplified both by his willingness to go out on a limb to help those whom he thinks have been wronged by the system and the fact that, of his many, many achievements in medicine none has come about from trampling on others, a rare thing even in the supposedly genteel world of academic medicine.
On the contrary, his achievements have come about through his inexhaustible energy, his genial manner which belies a searing intellect and his inability to say ‘no’ when someone asks for his help. Since he finally retired last year, I have lost count of the number of people who have said to me, “…of course, John Pepper used to do it but since he retired…”
Lest you think that all of the above left John with no time for anything else, you would be wrong: in 1973 he married Hilary, a lawyer turned magistrate; Hilary and John have therefore just celebrated fifty years of marriage. Two sons, Thomas Robert and Ross Henry, followed in 1977 and 1983 respectively. John is a polymath: his richly deserved and, it is to be hoped, long and healthy retirement is filled with learning to speak Russian, sailing his boat in Norfolk, time with his young grandchildren and wider family, as well as taking his much-loved Labrador for his weekly hydrotherapy sessions.
I have had the great good fortune to have been his registrar, his senior registrar, his consultant colleague, and am proud to call him a friend. When John sent me an SMS at some improbably early hour (even in retirement, he is up and about at four in the morning), asking if I would “say a few words” at this event, I could not have been more touched. Joining, as he does, previous winners including Magdi Yacoub, Terence English, Donald Ross, Peter Goldstraw, Bill Brawn, Marian Ionescu, I cannot think of anyone more deserving of such an award. I would ask therefore that you stand, and bring the roof down in acknowledgement of John Pepper, recipient of the Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons Lifetime Achievement award.
