Arthur Doyne Courtenay Bell

Arthur Doyne Courtenay Bell (15 June 1900 – 16 September 1970) was a British physician and consultant paediatrician.

To his friends he was known as DB. Early life Born at Prestwich, Lancashire, Bell was the son of Robert Arthur Bell, a consulting engineer and mathematician, and his wife Evelyn Maud Richardson, and was related through his father’s family to Thomas Sydenham, a 17th-century physician. and had five sisters and a brother. Before he was born, the family had lived at Cuddalore in the Madras Presidency of British India and in Dinton, Wiltshire. By 1911 it had moved to a 14-room house in Wimbledon, Surrey, and had three servants.

The young Bell was educated at King's College School, Gresham's School, St John's College, Oxford, where he held a scholarship and was Adrian Graves Memorial Exhibitioner, and St Thomas's Hospital,

Bell's older brother David Courtenay Bell, an officer in the Royal Navy, died on 6 July 1918, aged 23, while on duty in HMS C25 during the First World War. By then, their parents were living at Waldegrave Park, Strawberry Hill.

Career Bell served his pre-registration years as a house physician and anaesthetist at St Thomas's Hospital, and in 1931 published with G. H. Fitzgibbon a paper on pyloromyotomy, "The Rammstedt operation for treatment of congenital hypertrophic pyloric stenosis: a statistical review of results". In that year, he was awarded a valuable Perkins travelling fellowship to study in Vienna and Berlin.

On his return to England in 1932, Bell was appointed as chief assistant in the children’s department at St Thomas's Hospital.

Character and private life An obituary noted that Bell never patronized or talked down to children and would discuss their cases with them "as gravely as if they were distinguished colleagues". A clubman and bon vivant, he had a genial manner and was elected chairman of the Savile Club. He played golf, was a fly-fisherman, and in later life took up painting in oils, exhibiting work at the Royal Academy.