The enthusiasms and expertise of the physician and well-known Oxford figure Bent Juel-Jensen ranged far and wide to include such disparate fields as Elizabethan literature, collecting Ethiopian gold coins and the treatment of herpes.

And as each of his interests developed, it branched out into new adventures, friendships and explorations. For instance, groups setting out on expeditions were ideal controlled experiments for his research into infectious diseases (his book Expedition Medicine appeared in 1986), and a visit to Ethiopia led to a study of the coinage (again he wrote the book). Learning Ethiopian languages enabled him to identify a series of faked manuscripts, as he fed the bibliophile appetite that ranged from Elizabethan literature to the works of his friend Bruce Chatwin (whose life he once saved by diagnosing fungal septicaemia).

Though he could be astringent, Juel-Jensen loved to share his knowledge, and he helped generations of medical students, travellers and bibliophiles. His generosity to the Bodleian Library was such that his name is already carved there in marble.

Bent Einer Juel-Jensen was born in Odense, Denmark, in 1922. His mother was an inspector of schools and his father was a teacher, naturalist and book collector (whose Scandinavian books passed in time to the Bodleian). Bent showed an early aptitude for languages. He was educated at the Cathedral School in Odense, and read medicine at Copenhagen University. He was active in the resistance to the Nazis, and subsequently served two years in the Danish Navy.

In his teens he had written to Harrow to find a pen friend, and a correspondence with Mark Maples had followed. Maples was killed in a plane crash during the war, but in 1947 his family invited Juel-Jensen to Britain. He met Maples’s twin sister, Mary, whom he was to marry two years later, and a place for him to read physiology was found at New College — he had already qualified in medicine but his degree was not recognised in Britain. His Oxford education was to be anything but narrow. His physiology tutor devoted three lessons to Sidney’s Arcadia, and introduced him to two of the college’s bibliophiles and fellows in English, Lord David Cecil and John Buxton.

In 1951 Juel-Jensen became the first treasurer of the Oxford Bibliophiles, and the following year he served as their junior president. Twenty-five years later he wrote the introduction to The Warden’s Meeting, a volume of reminiscences presented to John Sparrow.

It did not take long for Juel-Jensen to prove his determination as a collector. He delighted in that most corporeal of literary eras, 1550-1650, and having made a long study of hypertension, wrote on Stephen Hales, the first man to measure blood pressure and the capacity of the heart.

His collecting led to several bibliographical contributions to The Book Collector. One was a pioneering checklist of editions of Sidney, largely in his own library. He had joined the Friends of the Bodleian Library in 1954 became a member of the council in 1957.

Meanwhile he was rising from houseman to consultant at the Radcliffe Infirmary, and then senior hospital medical officer in the united Oxford hospitals. His many papers on infectious diseases began with one written in 1956 with Fred Hobson, which advocated that patients with infected heart valves should have all their teeth extracted.

Dozens more papers were to follow in The Lancet, the British Medical Journal and elsewhere, covering a wide variety of symptoms, diseases and treatments, including, for instance, herpes, and human viruses transmitted by birds. He was to become known for his pioneering use of antiviral drugs, notably for shingles.

From 1960 he was medical officer to the staff and students at the Radcliffe Infirmary, which led to the development of student health, a specialism with specific problems, such as glandular fever.

He had an international reputation for his knowledge in this area, and was therefore a natural choice, for the job of medical officer to the university (1977-90), He fulfilled its clinical, political and pastoral requirements meticulously.

Thanks to travels that took him up mountains, down potholes and to islands scattered across the world, his office in the Radcliffe Infirmary overflowed with fossils, animal skeletons, engravings and other artefacts. (It was no surprise when he wrote an article in 1994 on cabinets of curiosities.)