AN inspirational city doctor died after being exposed to asbestos in "grim old hospitals" in his native Scotland 30 years earlier.

Glasgow-born Dr Kieran Sweeney breathed in dust and debris from asbestos pipe lagging at the Royal Infirmary and Southern General Infirmary where he worked in the late 1970s, an inquest was told.

Just two weeks before he died from the lung cancer mesothelioma, 58-year-old Dr Sweeney wrote to his lawyers to say he had been exposed to the disease in the medical block at the 19th century "old and somewhat grim stone-built" Southern General Hospital.

He said he saw tradesman two or three times working in the medical block on the pipes in the late 1970s when he was training and then working as a houseman before he moved to Exeter in 1979.

The inquest heard that Dr Sweeney had been to see his own GP in October 2008 with a "tickly cough", he then had chest X-rays and five months on chemotherapy until June 2009 when he decided not to have any more treatment other than palliative care until he died on Christmas Eve 2009 at his family home near Exeter.

Father-of-four Dr Sweeney, himself the son of a doctor, was an honorary professor of General Practice at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry and a GP in one of the very few nurse-led practices in the UK.

His son Mike called his father a committed GP and medical scholar who was an expert on primary care.

He was a fellow of the Royal College of GPs and the Royal Society of Arts, a health correspondent for The Times, and an adviser to the Department of Health's Commission for Health Improvement.

His 22-year-old son Mike wrote an obituary saying: "He will be remembered for his commitment to the practice and teaching of clinically excellent and compassionate care — fuelled in the last 14 months of his life by his personal experience as a cancer patient.

"He was very well known for his professional and personal humility and had a very high regard for the contribution of nursing to patients."

The Exeter inquest heard that the mesothelioma can, in most cases, take up to 30 years from low-level exposure before it proves fatal.

A report by Dr Robin Rudd, a London-based consultant physician and leading expert on mesothelioma, said that other medical and nursing staff at several other hospitals around the country had suffered similar circumstances.

Deputy Devon coroner Darren Salter told the inquest, attended by Dr Sweeney's widow Barbara, that there was sufficient evidence that he had died from industrial disease due to asbestos exposure.

Mr Salter said Dr Sweeney's decline had happened very quickly which must have been a great shock to his family.

He had been the co-founder of the revolutionary Exwick surgery in Exeter with nurse Gillian Champion in 2005, one of only six nurse-led practices in the UK. She said: "Patients still comment on his unique sense of humanity. They are still in awe of him and the difference he made to their lives."