Wilbert Hurst Brown, a native of Regina, was born the son of Alexander Hurst Brown and his wife Ethel (née Mickleborough). He graduated at Saskatchewan University and on a Rhodes scholarship was a student at Lincoln College, Oxford, and at St. Mary’s Hospital. After holding a resident post at Toronto General Hospital he did post-graduate work on a Radcliffe travelling fellowship at the Physiological Institute at Gottingen and then at the National Heart Hospital in London. Then, having decided to specialise in cardiovascular disease, he went to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. In 1936 he was appointed to the teaching staff of the Toronto Western Hospital of Ontario University, becoming assistant professor of medicine in 1949 and professor in 1958.

Under his enthusiastic leadership the University medical department developed a research programme, to which he contributed advances in the knowledge of antibiotics and anticoagulants. From 1949 to 1950 he was chairman of the medical section of the Academy of Medicine, from 1958 to 1960 chairman of the Medical Advisory Board of the Canadian Heart Foundation, and from 1958 to 1962 its director. He was also a member of the Medical Advisory Committee of the Toronto Rehabilitation Centre and of the Advisory Committee of the Gairdner Foundation.

Brown served in both World Wars; in the First in the Royal Flying Corps; in the Second in the Royal Canadian Medical Corps, acting as chairman of the Army Medical Research Committee from 1942 to 1946.

In his busy life he still found time for a wide range of community interests and was a member of the University Club and of the Toronto Hunt Club. On his sudden death in 1964 he was mourned by a large circle of patients and fellow citizens of Toronto. In 1946 he married Sylvia Dilworth.

Richard R Trail

[Canad. med. Ass. J., 1964, 91, 91; Trans. Amer. clin. dimat. Ass., 1964, 76, xlvii-xlix; Trans. Ass. Amer. Phys., 1964, 77, 14-16.]