Jack Potter, a renowned academic and physician who enjoyed a distinguished career on both sides of the Atlantic, has died at the age of 90.
The son of a Lanarkshire boy miner who became a minister, Jack rose to associate dean of New York University’s school of medicine and executive dean of the faculty of medicine at Edinburgh University in his chosen profession.
Specialising in rheumatic disease and arthritis, he produced numerous papers and publications, counting among his co-authors a Nobel Prize winner.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh while working in New York.
Jacobus Louw Potter, always known as Jack, was born in Fife, one of four children of the Rev Robert Douglas Potter and his wife Alice. Jack was born just 24 hours after his first wife.
Their birth announcements appeared in The Scotsman on the same day, November 22 1924. Their paths would not cross again for many years but he and Elizabeth Ross, a fellow physician, married in 1949 after he graduated MB ChB from Edinburgh University where he had studied after leaving Beath High School, Cowdenbeath. They married in 1949 and had three children before her death in 1979.
He met Catherine Matthews, known as Rena, four years later. They married in 2007.
Predeceased three months earlier by Rena, he is survived by his daughters Jane and Dorothy, son James and extended family.