David Short came from a family with a strong medical and Christian tradition. His father, Latimer, was a public health physician and his more famous uncle was Arthur Rendle-Short, Professor of Surgery at Bristol University. His two younger brothers also became doctors.
He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he graduated in the midst of war in 1942, and gained the Gold Medal at Bristol Medical School where he completed his clinical studies. During the periods of jungle warfare, while serving in Burma in WWII, absolute quiet was maintained at night to avoid the British Fourteenth Army positions being identified, and in the silence of his trench under a thick blanket he taught himself New Testament Greek by torchlight.
Following demobilisation he returned to work in Bristol, and then had various hospital posts in London. In 1960 he was appointed Consultant Physician in Aberdeen and started weekly postgraduate teaching in 1961. In 1977 he was appointed Physician to HM The Queen in Scotland, formalising a summer on-call commitment that he had accepted for several years.
