Sidney Montague Hilton was Bowman Professor and Head of the Department of Physiology at the Medical School in Birmingham from 1965 to 1983. He was a distinguished physiologist who made leading contributions to our understanding of brain control of stress-induced cardiovascular changes. He studied medicine at Cambridge and Guy’s Hospital, London. Following National Service at the Institute of Aviation Medicine, he worked in Professor Adrian’s Cambridge laboratory and then under Professor Feldberg at the Medical Research Council (MRC), London. After initial studies on vasodilatory mechanisms in muscle and salivary glands, he turned to the animal defense response – establishing the then revolutionary notion that blood pressure was not controlled by a single brain centre under these circumstances. He developed this work further in Warsaw and England, with Andrzej Zbrożyna of the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. On his appointment to Birmingham, he built a department with an international research reputation and helped to establish the Physiology Department in the new Medical School in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (Harare, Zimbabwe). He was elected an Honorary Member of The Physiology Society in 2004.

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