Born on 23 June 1901 in New Amsterdam, British Guiana, he was the son of William George Boase, MRCS, LRCP. He was educated at Mount St Mary's, a Jesuit college in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and St Thomas's Hospital, London, where he was influenced by the late Philip Mitchiner, then resident assistant

Lewis Herbert Savin was born in London on 26 March 1901. His parents were missionaries who had fled from China at the time of the Boxer rebellion a few months before his birth. Shortly after, his father and mother returned to the hospital that his father had founded at Chao Tung in Yunnan. He used t