Lord Walton of Detchant obituary
John Walton, Lord Walton of Detchant, who has died aged 93, was a neurologist who improved the diagnosis and treatment of muscular dystrophy. He headed several medical charities and raised substantial funds for them; and was a popular medical politician, as head variously of the General Medical Council, Royal Society of Medicine and the British Medical Association. His publications included a classic textbook, Essentials of Neurology (1961), and books on disorders of voluntary muscle, brain haemorrhage, and the history of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the commonest form of the condition. He also co-edited the Oxford Companion to Medicine (1986).
Walton was born in a Durham mining village, Rowlands Gill, to Eleanor (nee Watson) and Herbert, both Methodist teachers, who taught him the value of hard work. At medical school in Newcastle upon Tyne he was active in student politics, graduating in 1945 with a first and most of the prizes. After two years' national service as an army doctor he returned to Newcastle, where he was inspired by two neurology greats, Fred Nattrass and Henry Miller, to study muscular dystrophy, at first thought to be a single condition that caused muscle wasting, but now known to be a group of linked genetic diseases.
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