Periodically he organized triumphant and happy reunions of many of these ‘old boys’ (and increasingly ‘girls’) in London. He would repeatedly work on multiple drafts of scientific papers, initially in his study built in the roof of his house, using a pared down pencil, until they finally came back to resemble the initial submission by fellows, which they had sensibly retained. Williams therefore spread the expertise of hepatology around the world. He was its director until his death in 2020.īy that time the three liver units had published more than 2500 scientific articles and reviews, and had over fifty years been home to more than 400 clinical and research fellows from the UK and abroad. In 2016 he moved the unit again, back to south-east London, where the foundation built a third free-standing research unit close to King’s College Hospital and where he was able to liaise with the clinical service. And so in 1996 at the age of sixty-five, when he had to leave the NHS, with the support of the Foundation Williams moved the research part of the unit and its staff to the purpose-built Institute for Hepatology on the campus of University College, London, where he became professor of hepatology. In 1974 Williams founded the Liver Research Unit Trust, later the Foundation for Liver Research, which for nearly sixty years successfully raised funds to support the research programmes at each of the three units, and by the time of his death with an annual income of £2.5–£3 million. Williams and Sherlock became the king and queen of liver disease and between them they transformed the field. It soon rivalled the renowned unit at the Royal Free Hospital, and at European scientific meetings the fellows had to identify themselves as coming from King’s, London, rather than from the Royal Free Hospital, with which the unit was in friendly competition. Until then space and money were tight, and the first research fellows remembered holding meetings in broom cupboards. He was briefly consultant physician at the Royal South Hants and Southampton Hospital, before moving in 1966 with his first research fellow, Paul Smith, to King’s College Hospital, London, where he remained until 1996.Īt King’s College Hospital, Williams set up the first of his three liver research units, later Institutes of Liver Studies, opened by the Duchess of Gloucester in 1969, and to which he rapidly recruited medical and scientific research fellows from the UK and abroad. He joined Sheila Sherlock at the Royal Free Hospital in 1959, where he worked with Barbara Billing on bilirubin metabolism and developed his lifelong interest in hepatology, spending a year with a Rockefeller travelling fellowship at Columbia University studying hepatic haemodynamics. After national service with the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1956 to 1958, mainly spent at the Queen Alexandra Military Hospital in Westminster, he was for a year medical registrar at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and wrote his MD thesis on asbestosis. Williams was educated at St Mary’s College, Southampton, and read medicine at the London Hospital medical school, qualifying in 1953 with a distinction in medicine. At the time of his birth the family lived at 98 Upton Road, Bexleyheath, but by 1939 they were living at Jemaa, Mousehole Lane, Southampton. Williams, Roger Stanley (1931–2020), hepatologist, was born on 28 August 1931 at The Elms, London Road, Crayford, Kent (once the home of Sir Erasmus Wilson), the only child of Stanley George Williams (1901–1961), an advertising representative, later an estate agent, and his wife, Doris Dagmar, née Clatworthy (1903–1981), who ran the J. He led three different liver units/institutes in his long and accomplished medical career, led improvements in care for patients with acute liver failure, was instrumental in the first liver transplant and live donor transplants, wrote over 2,750 medical papers, led several commissions on liver disease and was one of the few UK doctors with a public profile as ‘George Best’s doctor’. Described variously on his death as a ‘giant’, ‘legend’ and ‘a towering figure in global hepatology’, Roger Williams played a leading part in the development of hepatology worldwide.
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