Blois Lawton was born at Lancefield, Victoria on 30 November 1886. He was descended from a medical family, his grandfather having practised in Suffolk. His father graduated from Guy’s Hospital where he was house physician to Sir William Gull, emigrated to Australia and practised at Lancefield. Both parents died before he was eleven years old and he was sent as a boarder to Brighton Grammar School under the guardianship of the headmaster, Dr Crowther, who remained his mentor for many years. He entered Trinity College in the University of Melbourne, graduating MB BS with honours, in 1913. His undergraduate years were spent in Trinity, an institution for which he developed a great affection. He was senior student in 1912 and a member of the College council and committee of the Union of the Fleur de Lys for many years.

Following appointments as resident medical officer and registrar at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, he saw service overseas in World War I at Lemnos, (in the Gallipoli campaign) and Egypt and France, with 3 Australian General Hospital, attaining the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was mentioned in dispatches and created an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. After his discharge from the services in England in 1919, he passed the examination for the MRCP and returned to Australia to take up an appointment as honorary outpatient physician to the (Royal) Melbourne Hospital. He was honorary inpatient physician from 1927, retiring in 1943 after fifteen years indoors, being then elected consulting physician. He was also consulting physician to the Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital. In 1932 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, one of the few in Melbourne at the time, and in 1938 was elected a foundation Fellow of The Royal Australasian College of Physicians and was a member of the board of censors for ten years. During World War II he was visiting physician to 115 Australian General Hospital, Heidelberg and a member of the Mixed Medical Commission. In post-war years he was a member of the War Pensions Assessment Appeal Tribunal.

Blois Lawton practised as a consulting physician in Melbourne from 1920 until angina forced his retirement in 1958, but he continued sitting on the Repatriation Appeal Tribunal until shortly before his death from acute heart failure in 1961. As a physician he was quiet and unassuming, meticulous with his clinical findings and noted for his acute powers of observation, sometimes giving the clue to a difficult diagnosis. He was a true general physician with wide interests, as indicated by case studies which he contributed over the years to the Royal Melbourne Hospital Clinical Reports on subjects as diverse as pellagra, acromegaly, foreign bodies in the oesophagus, pneumococcal meningitis, carbon tetrachloride poisoning, torulosis, typhoid fever and ulcerative colitis. In 1916 in Egypt he had made an original contribution to the early diagnosis of schistosomiasis in Australian troops which was published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

His students, those who listened and observed, learned sound medicine. He revelled in the anecdote and recalled the use in past years of dry cupping, the turpentine stupe, the linseed pack and leeching, to highlight the importance of nursing measures in making the patient comfortable, an aspect of treatment at which he was so skilled. Of slight physique and rather sensitive, he had a quiet and impish sense of humour and enjoyed a good joke even if a little risque. He died at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, the institution with which he had been associated for fifty-five years as student, resident, honorary physician and consultant, and which had been so much part of his life.