John Crofton was a physician who played a key role in the control of tuberculosis. An early champion of the randomised clinical trial, he was a determined campaigner against smoking and the misuse of alcohol.

It was in the application of treatments for TB, rather than in developing medicaments, that his early researches were most influential. Observing that patients in Edinburgh continued to be afflicted by TB despite being prescribed drugs that had showed promise, he learnt that TB bacteria could quickly build resistance to the medicines. The effectiveness of the drugs, he discovered, depended on how they were administered. The disease could be controlled and cured, moreover, with lower doses — as long as they were appropriately applied.

The precise combinations of three drugs — streptomycin, para-aminosalicyclic acid (PAS) and isoniazid — were critical. Results, Crofton found, also varied according to the period of time that courses of drugs were taken and patients with milder cases treated for short periods could fare less well than those with more severe affliction who took drugs for longer stretches. Disfiguring surgery, which had become routine in the treatment of TB, was abandoned while it became no longer necessary for patients to spend months as bedridden invalids.

Crofton also contributed to the advancement of medical science in the way he organised the research. Having become familiar with the work of Austin Bradford Hill while at the Brompton Hospital in London, he subscribed to his contention that one could make good therapeutic judgments by examining information collected from a random selection of patients and applying basic statistical principles to eliminate any bias that might arise in resulting sets of data.

Crofton chose to examine TB treatment failures. With a team including nurses, health visitors and social workers, to whom he always paid tribute, he scrupulously maintained records of bacterial analysis, and went to great lengths to ensure that medicines were taken as per prescription. Statistical analysis of data gathered from a group of sufferers, he discovered, was as important as the examination and care of individual patients.

The results of Crofton’s work were so encouraging that research authorities initially doubted the findings. By 1958 he was predicting that within 20 years TB would be under firm control in Edinburgh, one of the few places in Europe where it had increased after the Second World War. In the event, the programme was completed in six years and its methods were replicated across the world.

Although much reduced, TB was not eliminated entirely but nor did Crofton lose the zeal with which he fought the disease. In 1996, as chairman of a TB working party under the auspices of the WHO, he said that while prevention was the best treatment for TB, the best way to prevent the disease spreading was to cure sufferers as fast as possible and so stop them from infecting others.

In 2004, as president of TB Alert, a lobby group, he felt no compunction about attacking his political masters. He said: “Despite the seriousness of the situation, there is an apparent lack of urgency on the Government’s part to take action on TB. It is now two years since the Chief Medical Officer identified TB as an area where intensified action is needed, but there has been no movement since then.”

He formed the view early that cigarettes caused lung cancer — not petrol fumes, as some 1940s observers contended. He also assumed that lung cancer was not treatable in the same way that he found TB to be. “I came to believe the only answer was to prevent it — and that meant stopping people smoking,” he said.

In 1971 Crofton had helped to found Ash, the anti-smoking pressure group, and Ash Scotland, its sister organisation. In 2006 he was fêted as the tobacco industry’s “mortal enemy for the past 50 years” and the decision to ban smoking in public places in Scotland was the culmination of a lifetime’s ambition.

He also led the Alcohol Forum, set up by the Department of Health with drinks companies. He worked on recommendations that suggested public health policy was framed to highlight the dangers of alcohol abuse, to restrict advertising and to improve the enforcement of the minimum drinking age. The relationship between Crofton and his paymasters was strained, however, and he resigned in 1986.

John Wenman Crofton was born in Dublin in 1912. He went to Tonbridge School, Kent, then to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and St Thomas’ Hospital in London. In the war he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, the Middle East and Germany.

Before taking his position at the University of Edinburgh he lectured at the Postgraduate Medical School of London and worked in the tuberculosis unit of the Medical Research Council at the Brompton Hospital. While occupying his Chair, Crofton was also Dean of the University of Edinburgh’s Faculty of Medicine from 1963 to 1966 and Vice-Principal from 1969 to 1970.

He was knighted in 1977. From 1973 to 1976 he was president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He was subsequently made an honorary Fellow, and was elected to a similar role at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1997.

With Andrew Douglas Crofton he co-wrote Respiratory Diseases (1969); one of the most influential and widely used textbooks on chest complaints, it has run to five editions and been translated into several languages.

He is survived by his wife, Eileen, and five children.

Professor Sir John Crofton, lung physician, was born on March 27, 1912. He died on November 3, 2009, aged 97