Kenneth Gordon Lowe

Kenneth Gordon Lowe (1917–2010) was a Scottish physician who did pioneering research as a nephrologist and as a cardiologist.

Biography After education at Arbroath High School, he studied medicine at the University of St Andrews and the Dundee Royal Infirmary (DRI). In 1941 he graduated MB ChB from the University of St Andrews and shortly thereafter married Nancy Young, a medical student in his graduating class. He worked at the DRI and assisted with Daniel F. Cappell's pioneering blood transfusion service in Dundee. In 1942 he became a captain in the RAMC; for about two years he specialised in tropical diseases and served in the Caribbean, India, Egypt and Panama.

Rejoining his family in London after the war, he resumed postgraduate training and was medical registrar at the Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital from 1947 to 1951. There he worked with Graham Bull and Mark Joekes on Britain's first artificial kidney machine, invented by Kolff in the Netherlands. Their pioneering studies on the pathology, outcome and treatment of acute renal failure were published in the Lancet and in Clinical Science. In 1967 he published with Hamish Watson and Donald Emslie-Smith an important paper on intra-cardiac electrocardiography of the bundle of His; this was part of a research effort leading to therapeutic cardiac ablation techniques and improved cardiac pacemakers.

Lowe was appointed in 1971 physician to the Queen in Scotland. When he retired in 1982 he was made Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO). His wife died in 1999. Upon his death in 2010 he was survived by a daughter Alison, two sons Gordon and Graham, and five grandchildren.