Mohamed Shams El Din Salem was a geriatrician at Kingston and Esher Health Authority. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of Shams El Din Salem, an engineer, and Zeinab Rashad Salem, a housewife. He was educated at Alexandria and then went on to train as a doctor at the university in the city.

In the early seventies he went to the UK. From 1973 to 1975 he was a medical registrar at Southend Hospital. In 1977 he was appointed as a senior registrar at Charing Cross Hospital, London. From 1980 he was a consultant physician for the care of the elderly at Kingston. He published papers on the impact of Parkinson’s disease on respiratory function.

Outside medicine, he was interested in reading, travelling, sports, classical music and gardening. He married Asmee Hasan Salem, a physiotherapist, in 1961 and they had a son and a daughter, who became a paediatrician.

RCP editor