Geoffrey Walsh studied medicine at Oxford, graduating in Animal Physiology in 1943. He spent two years as a Rockefeller student at Harvard University, gaining an MD, and returning to Oxford to graduate as MA, BSc and BM BCh in 1947. In 1951 he was appointed lecturer in the Department of Physiology at University of Edinburgh, under David Whitteridge. His research concerned human neuromuscular control and vestibular dysfunction – especially balance and tremor. He studied paraplegic patients, eventually being promoted to Reader, and his research interest in spastic children was recognised in his appointment as Honorary Neurophysiological Specialist at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh. He was awarded Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1959, and then of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of London (1967) and Edinburgh (1968). A musician in later life, his inaugural lecture as extra-mural Professor at the University of Central England in 1998 was entitled: ‘Movement control in normals, the disabled and musicians: muscles, medicine and Mozart’.

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