page_title: John Alexander MacWilliam
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: John Alexander MacWilliam / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: 35 Drumsheugh Gardens, Edinburgh
context_page_description: John Alexander MacWilliam, a physiologist at the University of Aberdeen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a pioneer in the field of cardiac electrophysiology. He spent many years studying ventricular fibrillation, and was the first person to propose that ventricular fibrillation was the most common cause of sudden death - and that fibrillation could be terminated by a series of induction shocks to the heart. He was the first to accurately describe the condition of arrhythmia, and he suggested transthoracic pacing to treat transient asystole.
  Although his work was recognised within his lifetime, it was not until many decades later that it laid the foundations for developments in the understanding and treatment of life-threatening heart conditions, such as in the artificial cardiac pacemaker.
  MacWilliam was appointed Regius Professor of the Institutes of Medicine at the University of Aberdeen at the age of 29 in 1886, and remained in that post for 41 years until his retirement in 1927.
context_section_description: In 1889 at the age of 32, MacWilliam married Edith Constance Wise, the sister of Berkeley Deane Wise, a civil engineer. Edith died in November 1893 at the age of 33, of malaria contracted in the Canary Islands while her husband travelled on to South Africa.
  In 1898 he was married for a second time, to Florence Edith Thomas originally from Wrexham in North Wales, who outlived him by nearly two years. She was a trained nurse who had worked at the London Temperance Hospital and then as a sister at St. Bartholomew's in London and later as Matron of the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. In Aberdeen she involved herself in a variety of social work, including caring for soldiers returning from service during World War I. For all his married life MacWilliam lived in the village of Cults, now a suburb of Aberdeen.
  John MacWilliam suffered for much of his life from an obscure form of dyspepsia, only diagnosed (as duodenal ulceration) and treated in later life.
caption: 35 Drumsheugh Gardens, Edinburgh, where MacWilliam died
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