After wide ranging experience of both general and especially endocrine medicine in three London hospitals, as well as a few months in general practice, Christopher William Burke was appointed consultant physician with a special interest in endocrine and metabolic disease to the Oxford hospitals in 1973. This meant working as one of three consultants on one of the four “on-take” medical teams, with an evening round and another the next morning when on take, as well as providing a greatly strengthened inpatient and outpatient service for patients with non-diabetic endocrine diseases; its acme was his collaboration with the pituitary specialist neurosurgeon Christopher Adams. Their joint series of patients operated on for pituitary tumours matched in its results, both local and hormonal, the other best international centres. They were both plain speaking perfectionists, who appreciated one another’s directness. Their joint 1993 paper, published a year before Christopher retired, was a much quoted assessment of the then current modes of treatment of pituitary tumours, but 12 of his other papers, often in collaboration also with John Bevan, later professor of endocrinology in Aberdeen, and/or Margaret Esiri, described …