My friend Stephen Dawson, who has died of cancer aged 78, had the questionable luck of being a newly minted urologist when Aids first struck in London in the early 1980s.
The son of Philip, a nuclear physicist at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, and May, a housewife, Steve was born in London, went to King Alfred’s school, Wantage, and studied medicine at University College Hospital before qualifying as a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in the late 70s. The decade that followed was both clinically fascinating and emotionally challenging.
Working in genitourinary clinics around London, Steve helped chart the rise of HIV-opportunistic diseases while being able to do little to treat them. It was typical of him that, in 1988, he left Aids medicine in London for the professionally less glamorous Slough, to work as the first consultant in genitourinary medicine in east Berkshire. When he arrived at Upton hospital, he recalled, his department consisted of three part-time doctors and a nurse; there was no HIV care at all.
By the time he left 28 years later, in 2016, it had grown into the first fully integrated sexual health service in the UK, providing holistic treatment across all medical disciplines; a model that had since been adopted by other primary care trusts.
While the consummate doctor, Steve had interests beyond white coats. Nearing 70, he took up writing film scripts. (He himself had movie star good looks, a fact of which he seemed utterly unaware.) Three of these were made into short films, shown at festivals in Europe and the US; a fourth, feature-length film was still in planning when he fell ill last year.
He also achieved some success as a painter, particularly of portraits in acrylic. “Most people dislike my paintings,” Steve said, happily. “I don’t blame them.” This diffidence was not shared by the judges of the 2016 BP Portrait Awards, and one of his works made it through to the competition’s final round. Visitors to Steve’s London hospital bed were sketched on a graphics tablet balanced on his knees, the brightly coloured results bearing a distant resemblance to Hockneys.
Always a lover of the sea, Steve retired to Hastings in east Sussex, to paint and write and do crosswords; typically, he reached the final of the Times crossword championship.
A brother, Geoffrey, predeceased him. He is survived by his partner, Dimitry Kalinin.
