Brian Maegraith was born the third son of Louisa Gilmore and Alfred Maegraith at Prospect in Adelaide on 26 August 1917. Early in his schooling, commencing at Kyre College, his scholarship and a superb memory were apparent. Most of his education, however, was at the Collegiate School of St Peter where he sustained his schooling fees by a series of scholarships having entered the school at about ten years of ago. At home, his father, a bookish, scholarly anglophile, nurtured his son's talent so that by the age of ten he was able to recite all seventy stanzas of Macaulay's Horatius from memory. Also, through his father, he developed interests in radio, astronomy and anthropology. He taught himself to play the piano and also showed considerable skill in painting, drawing and elementary sculpture. These pursuits, along with a growing ability with language taking the form of poetry and short stories, remained as hobbies throughout his professional life and which collated into a small book called A Book for the Other Side of the Bed which he gave to various friends in his later life. It is a delightful collection of poems, stories and other oddities that he devised in odd moments through a very busy professional career.

His undergraduate days were spent at St Mark's College Adelaide where the master, Dr A Grenfell Price took a personal interest in his development during his years at the University of Adelaide where he graduated MB BS in 1930. Following his intern year he spent one year in practice and was chosen in 1932 as a Rhodes Scholar which took him to Magdalen College Oxford where he proceeded to take an MSc in 1933 and a DPhil in 1934. He stayed on at Oxford as lecturer and demonstrator in the William Dunn School of Pathology and Staines Medical Fellow and tutor in physiology at Exeter College; and became dean of the faculty of medicine, a post he held until the outbreak of war where he served as a commanding officer of the malarial research unit. This responsibility took him initially to Sierra Leone where he quickly discovered the prevailing ignorance about blackwater fever which was a serious scourge in tropical parts. His Oxford training in both physiology and pathology had him investigating this serious disorder and the lack of understanding of its pathophysiology.

In 1944 he was appointed to the Alfred Jones and Warrington Yorke Chair of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool University, a post held until his retirement in 1972. His first task was to review the literature on blackwater fever and following some initial experimental work, he published a monograph Pathological Processes in Malaria and Blackwater Fever, Oxford, Blackwell, 1948. From this masterly review there followed many studies by aspiring PhD students many of whom came from South-East Asia, in particular Thailand, to which country they returned to help create a faculty of tropical medicine which was, and is seen, as largely a Maegraith creation.

With Dr ARD Adams he introduced the new antimalarial drug Paludrine which still has a place in the therapy of malaria. As dean of the tropical school his forceful personality which was both respected and liked developed the policy of the school best summed up in his own words 'our impact on the tropics must be in the tropics'. His work in West Africa was similarly notable where he forged strong links with the University of Ibadan and the University of Leghon in Ghana. As a man of vision his paper in the Lancet 'Under venis' (1963, 1, 401-4) foresaw need which yearly becomes more pressing, namely the taking of a geographical medical history as the earth moves rapidly towards being 'one world'.

In his position as permanent vice-president of the interim committee of the International Congresses of Tropical Medicine and Malaria he was looking forward to the next congress planned in 1992 in Bangkok where the school has developed his own initiatives. However after a short illness he died on 2 April 1989 thus denying him the pleasure and warmth of joining in conference many of his old students with whom he remained close friends. He married Lorna Langley of Adelaide in 1934. Lorna and a son Michael survive him.