DR PETER Watt, whose family has been linked with the medical profession in Tavistock almost 100 years, died on July 3 in the town's hospital. He was 83.

Tavistock historian Gerry Woodcock this week looks back on Dr Watt's career and family history:

IN 1788, a Cornishman named Edmund Pearse, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, established a medical practice in Tavistock's Brook Street.

In doing so he launched an enterprise which, more than two centuries on, flourishes in the Abbey Surgery on Plymouth Road. In the intervening years there have been many changes, and the practice has had a number of homes.

There was however, for almost half of the period, a constant factor in the presence of Tavistock's most enduring, and best-loved medical dynasty.

James Leslie Watt, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, came to Tavistock in 1912 to take over the one-man practice that had, by then, benn established for some sixty years in Westend House, the last house on the south side of West Street.

At the age of 49, he brought his eight children to enjoy the large garden and house that was both home and surgery. At 60, Dr Watt took into partnership his son Frederick, who was then 27.

In popular memory they were to remain 'Doctor Leslie' and 'Doctor Freddie'. Leslie retired in 1934 and died four years later.

Freddie married Ailsa Palmer and they had two children, Jean and Peter, who were, in different ways, to carry the medical tradition into the next generation.

Jean's husband Alan Winfield and the ground-breaking Ethel Strong, were both partners in Freddie's practice, as was Peter, who became partner in 1961.

Peter Watt was later to describe Westend with 'a small waiting room with a hatch to a small dispensary, lined with cupboards, drawers and shelves and filled with bottles. A corridor led to a small consulting room. It was all very cramped by today's standards'.

In 1964, the year following Dr Freddie's retirement, fresh premises were acquired in Russell Street, from where the move to the practice's present home on Plymouth Road was made in 1995.

Peter Watt, the younger of the two children of Dr Freddie, was born in 1928. Educated at Sherborne School, Cambridge University and the London Hospital, he held in-house posts at the latter before National Service. He married Alison Armstrong, a registrar in obstetrics, and they settled in Tavistock in 1960.

Peter assumed many of the responsibilities and projected something of the same style as his father. He was happy to embrace the kind of changes that faced the practice, and the profession, during these years.

Of the advent of the National Health Service, for example, he was able to say on his retirement: 'Throughout my professional life I was able to perform my own work, and refer my patients to a whole range of specialist services, without ever having to collect a fee.'

In 1982 he became the practice's first trainer. A public man who sat on a number of committees, he was also represented on various professional bodies.

To thousands who, over a 30-year period of professional service, benefited from Peter's skill and support, perhaps the abiding memory would be his conviction that human relationships lie at the heart of effective medical practice.