Davis Evan Bedford

Brigadier Davis Evan Bedford (1898–1978) was a British physician and cardiologist.

Life After education at Ipswich School and at Epsom College, D. Evan Bedford entered the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1916. In 1931 he was elected FRCP. In 1933 he was appointed physician to outpatients at the National Heart Hospital.

When WWII ended, D. Evan Bedford resumed his appointments at the Middlesex Hospital and the National Heart Hospital and established a large private practice in cardiology. In the post WWII era, cardiac catherisation and angiocardiography helped to revolutionise cardiac surgery. Evan Bedford and William Somerville worked closely with cardiac surgeons such as Thomas Holmes Sellors and Russell Brock. He was president from 1960 to 1964 of the British Cardiac Society and was in 1963 appointed CBE. He was intimately familiar with the history of cardiology and often quoted from memory such sources as Rokitansky’s Die Defecte der Scheidewande des Herzens, Lower’s Tractatus de Corde, or the writings of the Irish Victorians, Adams, Stokes and Corrigan. According to Peter Robert Fleming, the Bedford collection is an indispensable and comprehensive resource for historians of cardiology.

In 1935 in Marylebone, London, he married Audrey Selina Ely (b. 1902), daughter of Milton Victor Ely (b. 1873), chair of the Board of Governors of the National Heart Hospital. Evan and Audrey Bedford had two sons.

Selected publications