Anderson was born in Middlesbrough on 31 May 1918, the son of a Glasgow-trained GP. He won a scholarship to study medicine at the University of St Andrews. He 1939 he graduated with a BSc in Anatomy, and MB in 1942.[5]
He returned to Scotland to lecture in Pathology at the University of Glasgow, also working at Glasgow Western Infirmary. He then became the George Holt Professor of Pathology at the University of Liverpool. In 1967 he returned to Glasgow as Professor of Pathology at the University.[6]
^‘ANDERSON, Prof. John Russell’, Who Was Who, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2008; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2012; online edn, Nov 2012 accessed 29 Sept 2013
