Tribute to Professor Hugh MacPherson

TRIBUTE

Professor Hugh MacPherson: Surfer of many kinds of wave

BAcC Executive Committee meeting, with Yvette Evans-Foster, c 1998

With great sadness, the Northern College of Acupuncture (NCA) have to announce that our co-founder, chair of our Board and trustees, colleague, friend, fellow of the BAcC and hero to many, Professor Hugh MacPherson, died in August after a short illness, aged 72. On learning of Hugh’s declining health, a global network of Hugh’s friends and colleagues came together to make a book of celebration about his life and work, which was presented to him in July. The book reads like a Who’s Who of global acupuncture, and what shines out from its pages is not just the breathtaking span of Hugh’s achievements – enough for several lifetimes – but also the genuine love he inspired in the many people whose lives he touched.

So in writing this tribute to Hugh, we thought we couldn’t do better than to give the stage to just a few of those people. We hope this shows even a little of the man whom we’ve been privileged to walk alongside.

Hugh’s achievements as an acupuncture researcher, of course, are the main reason that acupuncturists know his name so well. As Professor of Acupuncture Research at the University of York, he has probably done more than any other single person to put acupuncture on the map of evidencebased medicine, right across the world. Harvard Medical School’s Professor Ted Kaptchuk said of Hugh: ‘He has laid the foundations for the authenticity of our profession in the West. His contributions are staggering… he was an amazing combination of modesty and greatness.’ The irrefutable evidence that acupuncture is more than just placebo – now accepted amongst medical researchers and scientists – owes a great deal to Hugh’s work.

And the research achievements continue. For instance, without Hugh’s work with the Society for Acupuncture Research and the Acupuncture Triallists’ Collaboration, it’s hard to imagine how NICE’s 2020 recommendation of acupuncture for chronic pain could have happened. Robert Davis, who led the groundbreaking US research project into acupuncture as an opioid alternative, gave Hugh due credit: ‘I couldn’t have done this research without

Above: Hugh receives his fellowship from BAcC chair, Charlie Buck, 2014 Left: the letterpress print commissioned by Hugh's NCA colleagues and presented to him in July

knowing that [he] had my back,’ he said. ‘An amazing researcher and a gracious and kind human being.’

Yet while collaborating at an international level, Hugh still worked a day and a half each week as a practising acupuncturist in his clinic, the York Clinic for Integrated Healthcare. NCA graduate Chrissie Thomas got chatting to a lady working on the Tesco checkout one day: ‘She’d suffered terribly from depression as a young woman, and nothing seemed to make any difference until she went to see Hugh,’ Chrissie recalled. ‘She told me: “He literally cured me… my depression never came back. Please thank him with all my heart”’. And 15 years ago, schoolgirl Gianna Chadwick – then a would-be chiropractor, now a GP working in Brixton – came to the clinic for a work placement. ‘Conventional medicine doesn’t have all the answers,’ she wrote. ‘If [Hugh] hadn’t given me the opportunity as a teenager, I would certainly be a less holistic, less openminded clinician now. Thank you for taking a chance on me, Hugh.’

Hugh co-founded the Northern College of Acupuncture in 1988 with Nick Haines, and many of the students he taught contributed to the celebration book. Graduate Jonathan Hill recalled hearing Hugh speak at an NCA introductory day, convincing him to sign up for the course: ‘All those patients who have gone on to have babies, those threatened miscarriages averted, those people in pain who gained relief; all those lives influenced as a result of Hugh’s few clear, wise words,’ he wrote. Over 200 people came together to celebrate Hugh in the book, and their range is astonishing: from the receptionists and staff at his clinic to students at NCA and other colleges across

The irrefutable evidence that acupuncture is more than just placebo owes a great deal to Hugh's work

the world, from ex-patients and BAcC colleagues to some of our medicine’s most well-known teachers, researchers and authors. Many people sent anecdotes of working with Hugh as a colleague, as a co-author, as a teacher, and always as a friend. Others talked about fun they shared with Hugh: dancing, skiing, barefoot lectures, encountering moose on snowy roads, helping to harvest honey from his beehives. Several remembered a conversation at the right moment, encouraging them to write, to publish, to collaborate, to trust their own judgement. ‘He has the capacity to make people feel seen,’ wrote Norwegian acupuncturist and researcher Merete Lindén Dahle.

There are revelations, too: who knew Hugh was a passionate windsurfer? In a letterpress print commissioned by his NCA colleagues and presented to him in July, there appears the line ‘Surfer of many kinds of wave’. It captures not just Hugh’s skill in balancing body, sail and board on the eternal yin-yang waves, but also his original research activities – he got his PhD in fluid mechanics before falling in love with acupuncture – and most of all, his uncanny ability to surf a well-chosen metaphorical wave at precisely the right moment. Without that ability, acupuncture would be a smaller, less well-known, and much less respected medicine; we’re delighted to know that Hugh chose that line to appear on his headstone.

Hugh was very moved by the book. He told us it made him laugh, and cry, and above all it made him ‘feel very loved’. That’s a small solace for everyone who contributed: we were able to tell him a little of what he meant to us, before he left us. And we know that he heard us, and that he understood.

The final word goes to Peter Delaney, Australian acupuncturist and long-term friend of Hugh’s, who wrote: ‘Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.’ And so, smiling, we say: thank you, Hugh, for everything you gave. We have cause to remember you every day.

Karen Charlesworth Member: North Yorkshire

A PDF version of Hugh MacPherson’s celebration book can be downloaded from the NCA celebration website, where you can also watch a short video filmed in July, in which NCA principal Richard Blackwell presents Hugh with the book and the letterpress print.

And if you’d like to add to the website with memories, anecdotes or words of condolence for Hugh’s family, please email the NCA research director Karen Charlesworth 〉 karencharlesworth@nca.ac.uk