The physician and gastroenterologist JH Baron’s stated hobby was “looking”; his quizzical gaze perused scientific data, paintings, buildings and committee members alike. Many were found wanting. Hugh, who has died aged 83, made the stomach his prime interest, and developed, from Kay’s 1953 histamine test of gastric secretion, the concept of peak acid output, first proposed in an article in the journal Gut in 1963. He suggested that, when gastric acid secretion is below 15 mmol/hour, duodenal ulcers do not occur, or will heal. This led to international recognition and in 1978 Hugh published Clinical Tests of Gastric Secretion.
Son of Edward and Dolly, he was born in Tottenham, north London, where his father was a GP, and educated at University College school, Queen’s College, Oxford, and the Middesex Hospital Medical School. He made a crucial move in 1968 to the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, working, unusually for a physician, in the surgical department. His clinical practice from 1971 until 1994 was at St Charles’ hospital, then at St Mary’s hospital, London.
He had five years on the “hanging committee” that assists the editor of the British Medical Journal to choose papers for publication; and was an early member of the Society of Authors’ Medical Writers’ Group, serving as its chairman from 1985 until 1987.
He was archivist of the British Society of Gastroenterology from 1981 until 1997, and its president in 1988-89. On its 50th anniversary in 1987, he chaired the jubilee committee and wrote a history of the society with fine vignettes of every officer.
He was clubbable, a member of the Society of Apothecaries and the Oxford and Cambridge Club, and in 1972 even the founder of a club, the Prout, for researchers of the stomach.
At the Royal College of Physicians of London he was a staunch ally when I sought to reform the method of electing the president from a personal to a postal ballot. He was an RCP councillor (1993-96) and gave a memorable Fitzpatrick lecture in 1994.
Hugh’s artistic interests were fostered by his marriages: the first, in 1960, to Wendy Dimson, an expert on Walter Sickert who became director of the Government Art Collection; and the second, in 1990, to the art historian Carla Lord. He found NHS hospitals dreary and advocated their beautification by art works.
After retirement in 1996, he spent winters in New York, becoming an honorary professor at Mount Sinai hospital and editing books on its history and notable physicians. He mined ancient medical records to reveal the story of 4,000 years of the stomach, an account he published as The Stomach: The Biography (2013).
He is survived by Carla, and by a son, Richard (sometimes known as Archie), and a daughter, Susannah, from his first marriage.
