During his university years Inman contracted polio, but he persevered anyway, finishing his medical education from a wheelchair. As a medical officer for the British government, he saw the aftermath of the thalidomide disaster: the drug, given to expectant mothers to combat morning sickness, caused grievous birth defects.
Wanting to ensure such a thing never happened again, Inman developed an early warning system to sound the alert over bad drugs more quickly. His “Yellow Card” system was adopted in 1964 by the U.K. Health Service, and soon detected a problem with birth control pills: they caused an increase in deadly blood clots. He determined the problem could be solved by reducing hormone levels in the pills, which dramatically reduced the problem but didn’t reduce their effectiveness, and saved thousands of lives.
Still, the Yellow Card system failed to detect a beta blocker which caused blindness, so he lobbied for a stronger system. The government refused to back that effort, however, so he broke off on his own, and helped the World Health Organization set up its own drug monitoring program. In 1980, he created the Drug Safety Research Unit at the University of Southampton, where he was also named the first professor of Pharmaco-epidemiology, where he taught doctors how to monitor patients for drug reactions. Dr. Inman died October 20 at 76.