The son of Caesarean Section pioneer Professor Murdoch Cameron, Society of Jesus (Jesuit) Cameron was a foundation Fellow of Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1929, and for many years a member of the Gynaecological Visiting Society.
Sam Cameron graduated from the University of Glasgow Bachelor of Medicine Ch.B, with commendation, in 1901.
Among his professional appointments he spent a year as house-surgeon at the Chelsea Hospital for Woman, in London, working under the pre-eminent British surgeons, Sir John Bland-Sutton, Victor Bonney and Sir Comyns Berkeley, forming enduring friendships with all three. Later he became head of the gynaecological wards at Glasgow"s Western Infirmary and in 1920 was appointed head of a gynaecological unit at the Glasgow Royal Maternity Hospital. In October 1934 he succeeded to his father’s former position, replacing John Martin Munro Kerr in the chair of Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow.
A popular teacher, Cameron was famous for his notably quick surgical technique.
He published four medical textbooks, including A Manuel of Gynaecology: Foreign Students and Practitioners (1915). After his retirement in 1942 Cameron was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Glasgow.
Throughout his professional life Cameron championed the reputation of the father of modern midwifery in the British isles, In October 1956 he gave the first lecture to the Glasgow Obstetrical Society having previously led the campaign for the renovation of Smellie’s tomb and having played the decisive role in the efforts to salvage Smellie’s library at Lanark. In honour of the plain and indefatigable Scot Cameron, instrumental in the foundation of a maternity hospital at Lanark, named it the Memorial Hospital.
A lifelong champion of the reputation of the founder of professional midwifery in the British isles,, Cameron both named a maternity hospital at Lanark, Scotland, after him and saved Smellie’s library from permanent loss. In 1929, in his Presidential address to the Glasgow Obstetric and Gynaecological Society Cameron said of Smellie: ‘Looking backwards, I see Smellie’s figure towering above all other’s As the founder of the modern practice of obstetrics, this plain, blunt, and indefatigable Scot has left a memory, to be cherished by all interested in this special department of medicine’.
