Kit Hill obituary

Over four decades, my father, Kit Hill, who has died aged 94, worked to develop the use of ultrasound in medicine, from the earliest handbuilt scanners with little computational power through to very much higher levels of sophistication. He and his team at the combined Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and Royal Marsden hospital in London also explored the biological impact and potential for risk from ultrasound exposure, developing safe codes of practice for worldwide application.

Kit’s career at the ICR started in 1957 when he was a PhD student mapping the concentration of radionuclides in plants, livestock and human organs following nuclear-bomb testing and power-plant failures. On a visit to Kit’s lab, Sir Ernest Marsden, who had worked with Sir Ernest Rutherford, was intrigued by the alpha particle spectrometer Kit had built from “bits and bobs”.

From 1958 to 1994, as a student, through research and teaching, and onwards as he became professor and head of the combined physics department of the ICR and Royal Marsden, Kit set great store in collaboration and nurturing individuals. He boosted international friendship by welcoming students, colleagues and visitors to the family home for simple, tasty meals, and good conversation would ensue.

Born in Carshalton, Surrey, Kit (Christopher) was one of the four children of Margery (nee Taylor), a PE teacher before her marriage, and daughter of the optical instrument engineer William Taylor, and Henry Hill, an industrial chemist. Kit went to Leighton Park Quaker school, Reading, and studied physics at Oxford, where he met Susan Maguire, whom he married in 1953.

Childhood bath times for me and my three siblings were rich with scientific exploration, from pouring and measuring, through floating and sinking and relative density, to the patterns in bubbles, all of which had clear relevance (though we none of us realised it at the time) to his work in ultrasound.

Approaching retirement, and looking for “what next”, Kit became involved in Pugwash Conferences on science and world affairs, soon becoming treasurer and then secretary. In this role, he joined Sir Joseph Rotblat , president and founder of Pugwash, in travelling to Oslo to receive the 1995 Nobel peace prize for the efforts of the conferences “to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms”.

Kit hoped he might leave the world a better place. He played his part.

Susan died in 2017. Kit is survived by his children, Catherine, Mark, David and me, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, and his sister Janet.