Austin Gresham was an academic and clinical histopathologist who spent his entire postgraduate career in Cambridge, where he was Professor of Morbid Anatomy and Histopathology, a Fellow of Jesus College and an Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College.

However, he found unexpected fame in his eighties as the unintentional grandfather of Brit Art. When Damien Hirst and his peers burst on the scene, it became apparent that Gresham’s Colour Atlas of Forensic Pathology, first published in 1971, had provided an important source of inspiration.

A copy was obtained by Hirst while he was a student at Goldsmiths and the graphic photographs, which included murder scenes, dissected organs, medical instruments, and maggot-infested bodies, were clearly an important source for many of the works by Hirst, Matt Collishaw and others. Gresham was unimpressed and felt that this had been a misuse of his book, which had been written for trainee pathologists.

In the last decade of his tenure, forensic work became his dominant interest. He brought his academic talent for meticulous, scientific observation and investigation to this field. He participated in many important cases but his last was in many ways one of his best. When the remains of Julie Ward, a young photographer who disappeared on safari in Kenya, were discovered, she was said to have been killed and eaten by wild animals. Her father, John Ward, was highly sceptical and called in Gresham, who said at the inquest: “To propose that Julie climbed up a tree after lighting a fire and was struck by lightning and fell on the fire is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. It is utter and absolute nonsense.” He showed, from examination of the few remains available, that she had probably been murdered before being dismembered and set on fire.

Geoffrey Austin Gresham was born in Wrexham, North Wales, in 1924. He won a scholarship to the local grammar school, Grove Park, from where he went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, on election to a Tancred Scholarship in medicine. While at Caius his considerable talent on the organ enabled him to make a valuable contribution to the college’s chapel services. As a medical student his deep interest in pathology and his special concern for cardiovascular diseases were inspired by the teaching by Henry Roy Dean at Cambridge and by Terence East at King’s College Hospital, where Gresham went for his clinical studies; at King’s he was awarded the Burney Yeo Scholarship and several other prizes. He played an active role in hospital life both as a clinical student and as a houseman, including composing musical scores for Christmas shows.

His period of National Service was spent as an army medical officer; he lent his typical energy to maintaining the great tradition of the Royal Army Medical Corps. When he returned to civilian life, as a university teacher at Cambridge, this sense of service made him join the Territorial Army, in which he rapidly rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel Commanding 162 (City of Cambridge) Field Ambulance. In this position, he met men from all walks of life, who uniformly admired their dynamic and intensely hardworking CO for his constant efficiency, humour and tolerance; he only retired when, as he somewhat ruefully put it, the spine of the TA was largely broken by the then Government’s policy of “reorganisation of the reserve army”.

In 1964 he was elected a Fellow of Jesus College. He served the college with distinction and devotion as Director of Medical Studies, Curator of Antiquities and also as President.

After return to Cambridge, he worked as a highly popular teacher of pathology as well as an energetic morbid anatomist and basic researcher. In the clinical field he had an eminent and gifted teacher in Max Barrett, who was then the Morbid Anatomist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Gresham succeeded Barrett in 1962 and while in the same post, in 1973, he was awarded with a personal chair in Morbid Anatomy and Histology at the University of Cambridge. Thereafter, he carried forward and expanded the meticulous system of examination and detailed record of autopsy and biopsy specimens initiated by Barrett.

At the same time that he was providing an histopathological service to Addenbrooke’s almost single-handedly, Gresham organised and directed a highly successful programme of research on atherosclerosis and played a prominent part in founding the European and British Atherosclerosis societies. He was amply qualified for this work, being able to combine sound experimental methodology with his profound knowledge of this disease in humans, often lacked by other laboratory workers who had studied only animals. Gresham and his group showed, by feeding animals with different lipids, that arterial thrombosis and atherosclerosis ensue as entirely independent processes. Moreover, by supplementing the diets of rabbits and baboons with beef fat, butter and eggs, disease of arteries strikingly similar to human atherosclerosis was induced. This work gave cogent experimental support to the concept that excessive consumption of certain foods is an important factor in causing human atherosclerosis; Gresham also showed that juvenile fatty streaks in human arteries are essentially similar to the larger and potentially harmful atheromatous plaques of older patients.

His enthusiasm for the problems of clinical pathology attracted him to many fields; thus his work emphasised the danger of staphylococcal pneumonia as a cause of death both of newborn children and debilitated adults exposed to infection in hospital by penicillin-resistant staphylococci. He made many advances in comparative pathology, a subject that always intrigued him. For example, he showed that the well-known “blistering disease” of broiler fowl is not caused by formation of vesicles within the skin but is in reality determined by traumatic swelling between skin and bone. Similarly, when his counsel was sought on the unexplained death of a giraffe, he solved the puzzle by demonstrating widespread tuberculous infection. Such incursions into veterinary pathology illustrate Gresham’s flair for investigating disease, wherever he found it. His interest fostered a close relationship between histopathologists and pathologists in the Cambridge School of Veterinary Medicine. In addition, he was always very ready to help clinicians from other departments with histopathological research problems, as well as his participation in an ever-expanding hospital diagnostic service.

As a teacher he was outstanding; students loved his friendly and humorous lectures. He wrote more than 150 articles in medical journals; his publications included lucid and highly successful books on general pathology, comparative pathology, forensic pathology (including an atlas on the patterns of wounds in addition to that referred to above), primate atherosclerosis and reversing atherosclerosis.

He was the Home Office Pathologist, initially for the whole of East Anglia, subsequently for the newly enlarged Cambridgeshire. No funded training programmes existed (or exist) for the next generation of forensic pathologists, yet he provided the inspiration and guidance for two of the most prominent young forensic pathologists of the past two decades: Iain West and Nat Cary, both of whom passed through his hands. In addition, numerous trainee histo-pathologists, who subsequently obtained consultant posts throughout the UK and farther afield, remain grateful for his tuition and wise counsel.

Although obliged by the prevailing rules to retire in 1992, he retained his wide interest in all things pathological and continued to teach undergraduates. He also was a successful and respected chairman of the M.D. Committee. Among his many honours he was particularly pleased to have been elected an Honorary Fellow of his old college, Caius, in 2001. As well as music, his interests included gardening and an appreciation of fine wine.

He was married for nearly 60 years to Gweneth Leigh, whom he met when they were both medical students at King’s College Hospital and who has now retired from her post of district physician in child health. Gresham is survived by her and their three sons and two daughters.

Professor (Geoffrey) Austin Gresham, histopathologist, was born on November 1, 1924. He died on July 24, 2009, aged 84