 He was educated at Prince Edward School in Salisbury and the University of Cape Town before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, where he was an assistant at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, Radcliffe Infirmary.He married Erica Elizabeth Griffith Brown on 12 December 1959.He was Resident Medical Officer at National Heart Hospital in London in 1958 before travelling to Australia, where he was first assistant at the University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Hospital from 1960 to 1968, reader in medicine at the University of Melbourne from 1972 to 1974 and was a professorial fellow at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra from 1974 to 1991, working as acting head of the Department of Clinical Science from 1975 to 1981 and acting director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies in 1982.