Mary Fulton Lutz, MD

Born:

Mary Fulton, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Medicine at Edinburgh in the 1960s, began work with Michael Oliver in the Cardiovascular Research Group. She was credited by Oliver for effectively bringing the “new discipline” of epidemiology into that unit. Her first studies were on prognosis in angina pectoris and on regional variations in coronary disease mortality in the UK. The latter study established that the CHD mortality rate in Glasgow was 2 1/2 times greater than in Oxford and southeast England. This led to a long-term focus by many UK investigators on that distinctive population.

This work she followed by studies with Marjorie Thompson of dietary differences and risk among the Scots and by collaborations with statistician Walter Lutz in the natural history of unstable angina and acute coronary disease in the Edinburgh Community Study. (HB)