Robert Victor Coxon was born 14 November 1914 and educated at St Dunstan's College, Catford. He entered Guy's Hospital as a War Memorial Scholar in arts, qualified in 1938, and after house appointments at Guy's took both the FRCS and the MRCP in 1940. After two years as a medical registrar he joined the RAMC as a medical specialist and served for three years in India, where he investigated the therapeutics of malaria and dysentery. In India he met and married his wife, Mary, also a doctor in the RAMC. After the war he went to Oxford as Betty Brookes Fellow and worked on carbohydrate metabolism of the brain under Sir Rudolf Peters for his DPhil. He worked for a year in the USA with Van Slyke, and always retained academic contacts, especially with San Francisco, after his return to England. He was appointed reader in human physiology at Oxford in 1951, and later fellow and lecturer and then Professorial Fellow at Exeter College. He continued the interest aroused by Van Slyke, Baird Hastings and Chaikoff in his work on brain metabolism, notably on CO2 transfer using radio-active markers, on diuresis in dogs and in critical accounts of the reliability of various physical instruments in physiological use. He was a member of the General Board of Faculties for over 20 years, served on the Nuffield Committee and as Chairman of the Board of the Faculty of Medicine, and was adviser to preclinical students. He was twice acting Professor of Physiology between permanent appointments and his advice and experience were much valued on these occasions. He admitted to being conservative, even Blimpish in his views. Understandably he had little time for administrators, but his distaste for anatomists was less comprehensible. He had high standards in research, the field in which he was most liked and admired, and felt that with the increase in quantitative values in physiology he would benefit from a degree course in mathematics which he took with the Open University at the age of 60. He died suddenly on 2 June, 1980 leaving a wife, two daughters, and one son who is a doctor.