“Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium,” wrote the 17th-century physician and religious author Sir Thomas Browne, “whose nature is disposed to live . . . in divided and distinguished worlds.” No one better exemplified this many-sided nature than the microbiologist and poet Edward Lowbury.

An “adoptive Brummie poet”, as he always styled himself, Lowbury was also head of the microbiology department at the Medical Research Council burns unit of Birmingham Accident Hospital for 30 years from 1949. There he made an international reputation for his work on the prevention of infection in burns, and in 1966 founded the Hospital Infection Research Laboratory at Birmingham, of which he was honorary director until 1979.

His vocation as a poet had begun to flourish in the 1930s, when it received impetus from his winning the Newdigate Prize when he was at Oxford. It continued alongside his career as a professional medical man and afterwards, his Collected Poems, 1934-92, appeared in 1993.

Edward Joseph Lister Lowbury was born in London in 1913, the son of a GP, and educated at St Paul’s School and University College, Oxford, where he read medicine, completing his clinical studies at the Royal London Hospital in 1939.

At Oxford, in addition to the 1934 Newdigate Prize, he won the 1935 Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize, and his first book of verse, Port Meadow, appeared in 1936.

On the outbreak of war he was called up into the Royal Army Medical Corps in which he served as a pathologist, mainly in East Africa. He was in Kenya when news of the nuclear bombing of Japan came through, and it was the day after the destruction of Nagasaki that he wrote his poem August 10, 1945 – The Day After. It was first published in Equator, the magazine of the Mombasa Arts Club, in December that year. Its bleak conclusion was: “For if God had nothing to do with it / Extinction is the least price man can pay.”

After being demobbed in 1946, Lowbury worked for three years in the Common Cold Research Unit before, in 1949, making the move to Birmingham Accident Hospital that was to shape the rest of his life. Over the next 30 years he wrote some 200 papers on such topics as antibiotic resistance, the behaviour of bacteria in burns and wounds and disinfection.

In 1965 he travelled widely in the US as a Medical Research Council consultant, and in 1968 he was chairman of a MRC subcommittee whose report, Aseptic Methods in the Operating Suite, became influential. In 1975 he co-edited Control of Hospital Infection: A Practical Handbook.

As a poet he continued to publish at regular intervals, generally with small presses. Some 20 volumes, either on his own account or with others, appeared between 1936 and 1993, notable among them being Time for Sale (1961), Daylight Astronomy (1968) and The Night Watchman (1974).

Lowbury worked largely in traditional forms, and was versatile in handling rhyme and a wide range of metres. Reviewers over the years admired his consistently restrained tone and, as the TLS put it in a notice on Time for Sale (1961), “a finely unobtrusive skill and truth”.

But on occasions a passion showed through. In Troika (1978), a volume which he shared with John Press (obituary March 29, 2007) and Michael Riviere, he was commended (again by the TLS) as being a “most versatile and disturbing poet, moving from aphoristic entertainment to poems of old age and suffering”.

Just as it seemed that his style might have gone out of fashion, in 1990 Selected and New Poems 1935-89 appeared and created new interest in his work. It was followed three years later by Collected Poems 1934-92. A more recent collection, Mystic Bridge, was published in 1997.

Lowbury’s wife, Alison Young, with whom he had three daughters, was the daughter of the poet Andrew Young. With her he edited The Poetical Works of Andrew Young(1985) and a Selected Poems (1998), and also wrote with her a biography of his father-in-law, To Shirk No Idleness (1997).

A fine pianist, Lowbury had an eclectic interest in music. He was a co-founder of the Birmingham Chamber Music Society. With Timothy Salter and Alison Young he wrote the critical study Thomas Campion: Poet, Composer and Physician (1970), a sympathetic and knowledgeable study of that many-sided Renaissance spirit.

Lowbury was appointed OBE in 1979.

Edward Lowbury, OBE, microbiologist and poet, was born on December 6, 1913. He died on July 10, 2007, aged 93