Dr Tony Wing (1933-2012)
February 22, 2012
Dr Tony Wing died on Friday 13 January 2012. 
Antony John Wing was born on 2nd May 1933 in Oxford, UK. He was educated at Rugby School, Lincoln College, Oxford and St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School.
In his final undergraduate year he had the remarkable good fortune to be an eye witness in May 1954 when Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile in Oxford. He moved on from Oxford for clinical studies to St.Thomas’ in London. A gifted sportsman at both cricket and rugby, he was captain of rugby in his final year as a medical student, winning the Hospitals Cup.
In 1960 he was called up for National Service with the RAF and spent 18 months in Aden. In 1964 he returned to Britain and was posted to RAF Halton for six months. There he worked under Tom Flynn in a renal unit renowned at that time for the treatment of patients with acute renal failure. Many of the patients were military personnel both home and from overseas, but the Halton acute renal failure service also served much of southern England. It was at Halton that Tony began his lifelong commitment to nephrology.
His nephrology training continued with Hugh de Wardener at Charing Cross Hospital, London; it was here that he first encountered chronic haemodialysis – in the days when it was a task for the junior doctors to prepare dialysis fluid by adding bottles of salts to tanks of water, then stirring with a paddle. His Oxford DM thesis was based on work done in the dialysis unit on calcium fluxes in order to determine the most appropriate concentration of dialysate calcium.
In 1968 Tony spent a year at Mulago Hospital and the University of Makerere in Kampala, Uganda. Then, in 1969 he was appointed consultant nephrologist to St. Thomas’s Hospital and Lambeth Hospital in south London. He was one of a cadre of young nephrologists appointed at that time who had a key role in developing renal units around the UK when the need for dialysis and transplantation services began to be recognised. Working with his senior colleague Norman Jones, and later with Philip Hilton, he devoted the next 24 years to developing and maintaining the renal unit at Lambeth Hospital and St. Thomas’s Hospital in south east London.
He also gave prolonged and innovative service to the ERA-EDTA Registry, which had its offices at St. Thomas’s Hospital. He worked with the Registry from 1974 to 1986 and served as its Chairman from 1976 to 1983.
For ten years he was a key figure internationally in providing reliable and incisive analysis of regular dialysis and transplantation throughout Europe. The analytical techniques he developed with Neville Selwood and the Registry team enabled data collected from virtually all European renal units to be collated so that authoritative analysis was possible. During his time as Registry Chairman his drive, enthusiasm and energy modernised every aspect of the organisation and, in particular, expanded its work to enquire into topical issues in the treatment of end stage renal failure. A particular feature of his Chairmanship was the way in which the international committee of experts came to be not only a very hard working and committed team but also a group of friends. Under his guidance, the ERA-EDTA Registry became the model on which similar organisations in other parts of the world were based.
Over fifteen years starting in 1974 he was author on a series of reports from the ERA-EDTA Registry outlining the progress in treatment of ESRD in adult and children in Europe, which influenced Government thinking across the world. His expertise was then harnessed to support analysis of requirements for UK renal units, published from 1986 by a committee chaired by Netar Mallick, who succeeded Tony as Chairman of the EDTA Registry. In the UK in particular Tony used demographic data to draw attention to underserved areas, one of which was the South West Thames region very close to his own hospital.
Throughout his career as an academic nephrologist, Tony remained above all a clinician. In 1994, towards the end of his career, he was invited to move to St George’s Hospital Tooting, only a few miles south of St Thomas’s, to spearhead the development of a new academic renal unit; this he achieved with great skill and hard work. He retired in 1997.
Tony was a charming and thoughtful man, who had about him a real and winning humility. He was a committed Christian whose beliefs were at the core of his values as a physician and as a man, and were a succour that helped him at the end of his life through a prolonged illness which he bore with grace and dignity.
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