parenteral administration, dosages and penetrations through normal and inflamed blood–brain barrier. He made comparisons of clindamycin with lincomycin against H. influenzae in vitro, and later demonstrated that clindamycin was active against Coxiella burnetti, the cause of Q fever. Other research has included studies on the antiviral aciclovir. Birmingham (1978) In August 1978, five years after returning from Bangladesh, Geddes diagnosed smallpox in Janet Parker, a medical photographer working in the East Wing of the medical school in Birmingham. She had been admitted to Ward 32 at East Birmingham Hospital after being diagnosed with at first chickenpox and then a drug reaction. Several physicians saw her before Geddes was called to the hospital for an opinion. Aware that Parker also worked in a room above the regional smallpox laboratory, he in turn called upon virologist Henry Bedson and both confirmed their suspicions that same day when they examined fluid from Parker's blisters and saw brick-shaped particles under the electron microscope, compatible with smallpox. Until this time, all the call-outs he received for suspected smallpox cases were false-alarms such as erythema multiforme and Stevens–Johnson syndrome. With the WHO about to announce the eradication of smallpox, it was widely thought that the last ever case of smallpox had occurred the previous year, in 1977 in Somalia. Parker later died on 11 September 1978 and became the last reported fatality due to the disease. Later, in an interview in 2004, when asked if Parker's case had any link with the 1966 smallpox outbreak in Birmingham, he replied "it is probably significant that the initial case in the variola minor outbreak in the West Midlands in 1966 was, like Janet Parker, a photographer in the Birmingham Medical School, where research was being carried out on smallpox viruses." 1980s He was appointed professor of infectious diseases at Birmingham University in 1982. In chapter seven of the Report of a committee of inquiry into the future development of the Public Health Function, chaired by the then Chief Medical Officer Sir Donald Acheson and presented to parliament in the wake of the 1984 outbreak of Salmonella in Wakefield and the 1985 outbreak of legionellosis at Stafford, Geddes was noted to head a subcommittee to deal with control of communicable disease and infection. 1990s In the 1990s, he was involved in tuberculosis (TB) research, leading the University of Birmingham team in the Glaxo Action tuberculosis programme that studied the