Search Results for Medical Obituaries - Narrowed by: Neurologist

First Title value, for Searching Culpin, Millais (1874 - 1952)

2024-05-04T07:52:29Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-02-05
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E004000-E004999/E004900-E004999
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/377166377166
Occupation General surgeon Neurologist Psychiatrist
Details Born on 6 January 1874 at Ware, second child and eldest son of Millice Culpin LRCP & SEd, and Hannah Munsey his wife. He was educated at the Grocers Company's School, where he acquired his life-long interest in entomology. His father emigrated to Taringa, Queensland, Australia in search of health and practised there from about 1890. Culpin as a young man worked in gold mines, travelled to Cape York peninsula, and was for four years a schoolmaster there and at Townsville. In his late twenties he came home and entered the London Hospital Medical College. He was Buxton scholar in 1897, won the junior Letheby prize in 1898 and the senior in 1900, when he took first-class honours at the intermediate MB examination. He served as house surgeon, orthopaedic house surgeon, and resident anaesthetist at the London Hospital, and then went back to Queensland to practise. From 1908 to 1913 he practised successfully in China, and was very busy as a surgeon at various hospitals during the revolution of 1911-12, working particularly at the Shanghai-Nanking Railway Hospital. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he was commissioned a Captain in the RAMC, and served as a surgical specialist at the Alexandra Hospital, Portsmouth in 1915 and in France 1916-17. Culpin was among the first who realised that "shell-shock" and the deep effects of fear in war, such as disordered action of the heart, were emotional disturbances, more acute than the anxiety neuroses of peace. His views were accepted and from 1917 till the end of the war he was a neurological specialist in the Army, and subsequently under the Ministry of Pensions. He did excellent work in this field, practising at Maghull near Liverpool, and collaborating with Drs Bernard Hart, T H Pear, and Aldren Turner. He wrote his thesis for the London doctorate on psychoneuroses of war. After his earlier experience in surgery and tropical medicine, Culpin proved a highly original and successful psychiatrist. He was appointed lecturer in psychoneurosis at the London Hospital in 1920, and built up a large private practice at 1 Queen Street. His methods were never spectacular, but he was a pioneer of dynamic psychology. He gave much time and thought for various public bodies. He acted for the Industrial Health Research Board in 1923 as an independent referee on the Report on telegraphists' cramp drawn up by Eric Farmer and May Smith. He helped to solve the problem of the causation of miners' nystagmus when serving on the British Medical Association's special committee on the subject; he also served on the committee of the psychological medicine group of the Association and on its committee on mental health. He was a frequent contributor to the professional journals and wrote several useful books. He was appointed lecturer in 1933 and professor in 1934 of medical and industrial psychology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and resigned in 1939. He was President of the British Psychological Society. His work on war neuroses was extensively used during the second world war. Culpin married in 1913 Ethel Maude daughter of E Dimery Bennett. They lived at Loughton and Park Village East, and latterly at 17a Hatfield Road, St Albans. He died suddenly on 14 September 1952 aged 78, survived by his wife and their daughter Frances, Mrs Stephen MacKeith. For all his love of controversy Culpin was a humble man, of strong moral and humanitarian compulsion, who achieved remarkable advances in psychology after an earlier period as a successful surgeon. His sound sense and wit endeared him to a group of colleagues, with whom he regularly lunched at the Royal Society of Medicine, for he was a first-rate talker. The natural history of birds and insects was his chief non-professional interest. Publications: *Psychoneuroses of war and peace*, London MD thesis. Cambridge University Press 1920. *Spiritualism and the new psychology*. London: E. Arnold 1920. *The nervous patient*. London: H. K. Lewis 1924. *Medicine and the man*. London: Kegan Paul 1927. *The nervous temperament*, with May Smith. Industrial Health Research Board, Report 61. HM Stationery Office, 1930. *Recent advances in the study of the psychoneuroses*. London: Churchill 1931. *Mental abnormality, facts and theories*. London: Hutchinson 1948.
Resource Identifier RCS: E004983
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
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First Title value, for Searching Verbiest, Henk (1909 - 1997)

2024-05-04T07:52:29Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2015-12-08
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E008000-E008999/E008900-E008999
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/381162381162
Occupation Neurologist Neurosurgeon Psychiatrist
Details Henk Verbiest, Professor of Neurosurgery at the Utrecht University Hospital, was born on 16 July 1909 in Rotterdam to Cornelis Verbiest, member of the board of a shipping company, and his wife, Mary née Peters. He undertook his medical studies at Leiden University between 1927 and 1934, during which time, in his second year, he received an honorary award from the university for an investigation into subcortical optokinetic aspects of vertical head nystagmus in the pigeon. There he also received training in neuro-anatomy from S T Bok. Subsequently, he trained as a neurologist and psychiatrist at Leiden with G G J Rademaker. In this period, working as a neurologist, he published a paper on aseptic, chemical meningitis caused by intradural epidermoids and carried out research for a thesis on the influence of the posterior spinal cord and medial lemniscal tracts on tonic postural innervation. For this he received a PhD. This work contained a detailed discussion of the pseudoparesis and athetosis associated with loss of proprioception in the upper limb, known in the Netherlands as 'Verbiest's sign'. Between 1938 and 1939, he worked in Paris with Clovis Vincent, the distinguished French neurosurgeon, who, like Verbiest, had first been a neurologist. At the outbreak of the second world war, he returned to the Netherlands and when his senior, Lenshoek, accepted an appointment in Amsterdam, Verbiest was left with virtually sole responsibility for the neurosurgical department in Utrecht. At the end of the war, Verbiest was able to make contact with neurosurgeons in other countries, including Dott in Edinburgh, Bucy in Chicago and the leading figures on the Continent. The building of the distinguished neurosurgical department in Utrecht needed immense energy and application, as well as force of character. Verbiest was a hard taskmaster and he was capable of having major rows in the pursuit of his ends, though he tended rapidly to forget them. The success of his department led to his being appointed as a lecturer in neurosurgery at the University of Utrecht in 1949 and Professor in 1963. He supervised 14 theses, and was responsible for training 11 Dutch neurosurgeons, two of whom became Professors. He stayed on as Professor for some time after passing retiring age, but became more philosophical in later life, taking a stoical view of the world. Verbiest made notable contributions to neurosurgery. He was the first to recognise, in 1949, the syndrome of intermittent claudication of the cauda equina produced by lumbar canal stenosis. Though this condition has proved to be relatively common and to respond well to surgery, and its recognition was of signal importance, Verbiest had trouble having his original description accepted in neurosurgical journals and it was five years before his paper appeared in English in the British version of the *Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery*. This rankled with him ever after. He was one of the earliest exponents of the anterior approach to the cervical spine, which he was encouraged to try by being told by his neurological colleague, Brouwer, that this was out of bounds for a neurosurgeon. He practised early the transoral route to the atlanto-axial region, and he also devised a lateral approach to decompress the vertebral artery when it was thought this might be a useful way of treating some forms of vertebrobasilar artery disease, and for brachial neuralgia. Earlier in his career, he developed techniques in neuroradiology, particularly involving fractional pneumo-encephalography and carotid arteriography with proximal compression of the carotid artery. These advances were rendered obsolete by the development of modern imaging and arteriographic methods. As well as being an original thinker, Verbiest was a skilful and bold surgeon who, as used often to be the case, demanded quietness in theatre, though this requirement did not prevent him from occasionally exchanging sharp comments with his anaesthetist and harrying his assistants. He was a smoker and did not always suspend this habit in the confines of the operating room. He was a founder member of the International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine in 1977 and its third President. He was active in the World Federation of Neurological Surgeons, of which he was made an honorary President for life in 1977. He was on the editorial board of a number of leading neurosurgical journals and founded, in 1986, the journal *Neuro-orthopaedics*, which was subsequently absorbed into the *European Spine Journal*. Verbiest gained wide international honours, being made an honorary member of the medical faculty of Baylor University in 1967, Commander of the Merit Order, Italy, in 1975 and Knight of the Order of the Lion in the Netherlands in 1978. He received an honorary Fellowship of this college in 1989. He had studied music, was an accomplished organist and had an interest in philosophy, particularly that of Kant, and in the impact of linguistics on science and philosophy. In 1953, at the age of 44, he married a young nurse, José Hage, and they had two daughters, both of whom trained as nurses. The older married a neurosurgeon. Verbiest died on 27 August 1997, following multiple laparotomies for an indeterminate abdominal condition.
Resource Identifier RCS: E008979
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
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First Title value, for Searching Penfield, Wilder Graves (1891 - 1976)

2024-05-04T07:52:29Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2015-02-25
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E006000-E006999/E006800-E006899
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/379031379031
Occupation Neurologist Neurosurgeon
Details The story of Wilder Penfield gives the lie to those Admissions Deans who hold that athletic prowess, particularly on the rugger field, is not a quality to be sought after for entry to a medical school. This great surgeon, scientist and human being was Princeton's prize quarter-back and coach. Wilder Penfield was born at Spokane, Washington, on 26 January 1891, the son of Dr Charles Samuel and Jean Jefferson. He was educated at local schools and at Princeton University (B Litt, 1913) where his fine record as a scholar and athlete won for him the Rhodes Scholarship for New Jersey. He delayed going up to Oxford in order to spend a year as full-time coach to the Princeton football team. He entered Merton College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1914 but his time there was interrupted by the first world war and he served with the American Red Cross Hospital no 2 in France before the United States entered the war. In 1916 he was severely wounded and returned to the United States to study medicine, securing a BA, a BSc and qualifying MD in 1918. He decided to become a surgeon and studied at Johns Hopkins University, then in London, spending a period with Sherrington at Oxford, at Harvard and Edinburgh Universities and in Germany and Spain. From 1921 to 1928 he was attached to the research staff of the Presbyterian Hospital, New York, and remained on it after he was appointed assistant surgeon at the Neurological Institute, New York, in 1925. Two years later he moved to Columbia University as Associate Professor of Surgery and became Assistant Professor in 1928. In the same year he was offered, and accepted, the Professorship in Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University, a post he held until 1954. Soon after his migration to Montreal in 1928 he was appointed chief neurosurgeon to both the Royal Victoria and the Montreal General Hospitals. By 1934, the high prestige which Penfield had acquired as a neurosurgeon was a large factor in animating the Rockefeller Foundation to provide a munificent endowment for the establishment of a Neurological Institute in Montreal and it was natural that Penfield should become its director. He planned the Institute as a purely Canadian one and he himself became a naturalised Canadian citizen. Recruiting a staff of able colleagues he soon made it one of the most efficient institutions of its type in the world and patients came from many countries outside North America. Despite his heavy burden of work he found time to write many valuable textbooks. He held that most people had it within them to adopt a second career on retirement. He himself exemplified this by writing enchanting novels and biographies. The novel *No other gods* (1954) was based upon the story of Abraham and Sarah while they lived in Ur of the Chaldees and *The torch* (1961) a reconstruction of the life of Hippocrates. He was engaged in writing his own autobiography when he died. During the second world war Penfield held the rank of Colonel in the Canadian Army's Medical Corps. After his retirement from the directorship of the Neurological Institute in 1954, he continued to act as a consultant and also became an assiduous propagandist for the improvement of Canadian education. Wilder Penfield was a man of mark in any company. He was very charming, with a wide range of intellectual interests and was singularly modest about his own accomplishments and honours. In his later years he was rated the most distinguished citizen of Montreal, where he had a wide circle of friends and by the Canadian public he was counted the most valuable recruit their country had ever received from the United States. Many honours were bestowed on him from all over the world. He married Helen Katherine (Kermott) in 1917 and the couple remained deeply attached all their lives. He kept until the end the superb figure that had made him Princeton's prize quarter-back. He died on 5 April 1976, survived by his wife, two daughters and two sons.
Resource Identifier RCS: E006848
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
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First Title value, for Searching Guttman, Sir Ludwig (1899 - 1980)

2024-05-04T07:52:29Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-12-11
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E006000-E006999/E006500-E006599
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/378729378729
Occupation Neurologist
Details Ludwig Guttman was born in Tost on 3 July 1899 into a modest Jewish family in the old German-Polish border province of Silesia, a coal mining area with character and speech comparable, it is said, to the Geordies and grew up a none too fit boy of small size. His father, Bernard, was a distiller and his mother was Dorothy Weissenberg, the daughter of a farmer. He was educated at the high school (gymnasium) Konigshutter, Upper Silesia. Towards the end of the first world war, he worked as an orderly in the local hospital where he first encountered problems of paraplegia among the miners and soldiers and was much disturbed about their hopeless future and the lack of any treatment. He graduated from Freiburg University in 1924. He used to say that he had intended to study paediatrics but, on hearing a large crowd were waiting to be interviewed for one job, he applied to the neurology department instead! He went to Breslau as an assistant to Professor Otfrid Foerster, a distinguished neurologist and neurosurgeon. During 1928-29 he worked in the department of psychiatry at Hamburg University and started the first neurosurgical department in a general mental hospital. He returned to Breslau in 1933 to be Foerster's first assistant. Foerster's expectations and his demands from his assistants were reflected throughout Guttman's working life. In 1933 Guttman became reader in neurology, but resigned the position four years later as a protest against the Nazis, although he was asked to stay on. He was immediately elected reader in the department of neurology and neurosurgery at the Jewish Hospital and by 1937 was medical director and responsible for medical and nursing education as well as chairman of the Jewish Medical Association. During this time he was able to help many people, Jews and Christian, to leave the country. He would admit healthy Jewish patients to his wards and teach them to simulate the physical signs of various neurological disorders! After the pogrom of 1938 in which the Jewish Hospital was involved, many doctors were arrested and Guttman was forbidden to leave Breslau. In fact, he left in 1939. The story of this escape with his wife and children is graphically described in a letter from Dr Raymond Greene to *The Times* on 29 March 1980. The Society for Protection of Science and Learning gave him a grant for research at Balliol College, Oxford, where he worked on nerve regeneration in animals and clinical research in neurosurgery. At the beginning of the war, he was appointed to the peripheral nerve team at Wingfield Morris Orthopaedic Hospital, Oxford, working on animals but again having clinical responsibilities of wounded service men. At the end of 1943, Guttman was asked to start a spinal unit at the Ministry of Pensions Hospital at Stoke Mandeville in anticipation of the large numbers of casualties which were expected following the allied invasion of Europe. Due to his drive and ability this unit developed into the largest spinal injury centre in Europe and the Commonwealth. As one of his friends wrote 'There can be no better memorial to him than the many thousands of disabled, not only in this country but throughout the world, who today are living useful lives, coping with their disability.' Without his efforts they would have been condemned to the human scrapheap. Some of Guttman's most notable activities included the foundation of the annual Stoke Mandeville Games in 1948, the building of the Stoke Mandeville sports stadium for the disabled and the presidency and other offices of various organisations for the disabled throughout the world. Of his numerous publications perhaps the most important were the *Handbuch der Neurologie*, 1936, *British medical history of world war II (spinal injuries)*, 1953, and *Injuries to the spinal cord*, Rothwell, Oxford 1973. Sir Ludwig's work on the control of urinary infection and bedsores and on general rehabilitation, both physical and psychological, helped thousands of paralysed sufferers throughout the world. He was a man of prodigious energy and enthusiasm. He founded and edited *Paraplegia*, the journal of the International Medical Society of Paraplegia. The May issue of this journal in 1980 was entirely devoted to special papers and appreciations from present and previous colleagues to celebrate his 80th birthday. Guttman married Else Samuel in 1927. His son Dennis is a physician at Peterborough and his daughter, Eva, is a physiotherapist. His wife died in 1973 and he died peacefully at his home on 18 March 1980, leaving his two children and five grandchildren.
Resource Identifier RCS: E006546
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
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First Title value, for Searching Paton, Leslie Johnson (1872 - 1943)

2024-05-04T07:52:29Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-10-02
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E004000-E004999/E004400-E004499
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/376633376633
Occupation Neurologist Ophthalmologist
Details Born at Edinburgh on 22 August 1872 the second son of James Paton, a Fellow of the Linnean Society and from 1876 curator of the Glasgow Art Galleries and Museum, and of Mary Kesson, his wife. He was educated at the Glasgow High School and University and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was a scholar. He took first-class honours in the Natural Sciences Tripos, part 1, 1893, and taught botany and physiology at Cambridge before beginning his clinical training at St Mary's Hospital, London in 1897, where he was Shuttleworth scholar. He served as house surgeon to Edmund Owen at St Mary's, 1901, and as demonstrator of anatomy in the Hospital's medical school. He also taught physiology under Sir Thomas M Taylor at Wren's coaching school in Powis Square, Bayswater. He had been particularly interested in botany and worked for a time in Sachs' laboratory at Bonn; but he decided to make his career as an ophthalmologist, and after serving as clinical assistant to Marcus Gunn at Moorfields he was appointed assistant ophthalmic surgeon to St Mary's in 1902, the year in which he took the Fellowship, H E Juler being his senior. In 1907 he became ophthalmologist to the National Hospital in Queen Square, where he gained his special experience in neurological ophthalmology in the last years of Hughlings Jackson's work there. From this double specialization he achieved at the same time, 1929-30, the presidency of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom and the presidency of the section of neurology at the Royal Society of Medicine, before which he made his presidential address on the classification of optic atrophies. He was also chairman of the Council of British Ophthalmologists. He was secretary in 1909 and president in 1934 of the section of ophthalmology at the British Medical Association's annual meetings. In his earlier years he made several important researches, working with Gordon Holmes on papilloedema and intracranial tumours; and he discovered the syndrome of optic atrophy in one eye with papilloedema in the other, afterwards known as the Foster-Kennedy syndrome (see *Archives of Ophthalmology*, 1942, 28, 704, for admission of Paton's priority). He had also discovered the causative organism of angular conjunctivitis, the Bacillus duplex or Haemophilus diplococcus, but hesitating with Scotch caution to publish prematurely he was anticipated by Victor Morax and Theodor Axenfeld, after whom the organism is usually called the Morax-Axenfeld bacillus. The statement that Paton anticipated Morax and Axenfeld is based on the obituary notices, but as Morax and Axenfeld published their discovery in *Annales d'Oculistique*, 1892, 108, 393, eight years before Paton qualified, his priority is doubtful. Paton exerted a wide influence through the *British Journal of Ophthalmology* of which he was chairman for many years, and also helped in the interbellum decades to resuscitate the International Congress of Ophthalmology, whose successful meetings at Amsterdam 1929, Madrid 1933, and Cairo 1937 owed much to his energy. Although of world-wide reputation he was ever ready to help young workers and took an active interest in current research. He was an excellent and popular teacher, with a soupçon of dogmatism. He retired from St Mary's in 1929 and was elected consulting ophthalmic surgeon and a vice-president of the Hospital. He was elected consulting ophthalmic surgeon to the National Hospital in 1937, in which year he gave the Mackenzie memorial lecture at Glasgow on optic neuritis. He was also ophthalmic surgeon to the Royal Caledonian Asylum, to the Royal Scottish Hospital, and to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He was an honorary member of the French, Japanese, Hungarian, and Spanish-American ophthalmological societies, the Scottish Ophthalmic Club, and the Royal Medical Society of Budapest, and an honorary Fellow of the American Medical Association, the Association for Research in Ophthalmology, and the International Ophthalmic Council. He had a very large private practice, which he carried on at 29 Harley Street till near the end of his life. In later years he suffered from deafness. Paton married in 1906 Mary, daughter of R R Kirkwood of Glasgow, who survived him with two daughters. He died in London after a long illness on 15 May 1943, aged 71. Leslie Paton was a patriotic Scotsman, with a Scottish accent and many of the best racial characteristics. He was a kind-hearted man with a keen sense of humour, cheerful, encouraging, wise, friendly, and of great knowledge. He was a firm believer in the recuperative value of holidays and regularly took six weeks away from all work each summer. He was a keen fisherman and very fond of golf, which he played chiefly at Elie in Fife and at Virginia Water. There he built himself a house, Scotch Corner, on the Wentworth estate, where he annually entertained the competitors for the Paton cup, which he had presented to St Mary's Hospital Medical School. He was tall and of imposing presence. Publications: Intravitreous haemorrhages, with W E Paramore. *Lancet*, 1905, 2, 1248. Optic neuritis in cerebral tumours. *Trans Ophth Soc UK* 1905, 25, 129-162, and 1908, 28, 112-144. Some abnormalities of ocular movements, with J H Jackson. *Lancet*, 1909, 1, 900. A clinical study of optic neuritis in its relationship to intracranial tumours. *Brain*, 1909, 32, 65-91. The localising value of unequal papilloedema. *Brit med J* 1910, 1, 664. The pathology of papilloedema, with G Holmes. *Brain*, 1911, 33, 389-432. Classification of the optic atrophies. President's address, section of neurology, RSM, 9 October 1930. *Proc Roy Soc Med* 1930-31, 24, 25-33. Optic neuritis, retrobulbar and papillary. Mackenzie memorial lecture, 29 October 1937. *Glasg med J* 1937, 128, 245-260.
Resource Identifier RCS: E004450
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
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First Title value, for Searching Stopford, Sir John Sebastian Bach, Lord Stopford of Fallowfield (1888 - 1961)

2024-05-04T07:52:29Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-06-25
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E005000-E005999/E005500-E005599
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/377763377763
Occupation Neurologist
Details Born on 25 June 1888 son of Thomas Rinck Stopford of Hindley Green near Wigan, he was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Manchester University, graduating with honours in medicine in 1911, having gained prizes and distinctions. In 1915 he proceeded to the degree of MD with a gold medal. In 1912 he was appointed a junior demonstrator in anatomy at Manchester University, followed by senior demonstrator, then lecturer, and in 1919 succeeding Elliott Smith as Professor, which chair he held until 1937 when he became Professor of Experimental Neurology until his retirement in 1956. During the war of 1914-18 he worked as neurologist at the 2nd Western General Hospital and at Grangemouth Hospital where he started his investigations into the anatomical basis of sensation. He was Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University 1928-30, for two periods Dean of the Medical School, and in 1935 at the age of 46 he was appointed Vice-Chancellor. He was in addition Vice-Chairman of the Interdepartmental Committee on Medical Schools, for many years a member of the General Medical Council, a member of the University Grants Committee, and a member of the Manchester Salford and Stretford Joint Hospitals Board, which was in existence long before the inauguration of the National Health Service, and naturally with its coming he was appointed first chairman of the Manchester Regional Hospitals Board. In many other ways he gave the benefit of his experience, as by his chairmanship of the John Rylands Library, the Manchester Royal College of Music, and the Universities Bureau of the British Empire. He was in the first list of Life Peers in 1958. A born and bred Lancastrian he enjoyed the outdoor relaxations of the common man, football and gardening. In his youth he was a really good half-back playing for Manchester Grammar School and Manchester University. Honest and wise, he was undoubtedly a great Vice-Chancellor as well as a distinguished scientist. In 1916 he married Lily (MB ChB Manchester 1914) daughter of John Allan of Blackburn and they had one son. He retired first to Morecombe Bay in 1956, and died on 6 March 1961 in his sleep at his home at Arnside, Westmorland aged 72.
Resource Identifier RCS: E005580
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
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First Title value, for Searching Brain, Walter Russell, Lord Brain of Eynsham (1895 - 1966)

2024-05-04T07:52:29Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-07-14
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E005000-E005999/E005600-E005699
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/377844377844
Occupation Neurologist
Details Walter Russell Brain was born in Reading on 23 October 1895 and went to School at Mill Hill. As it was anticipated that he might later go to the University to read law, he was on the classical side at school, but as he discovered quite early that he was more interested in science he had to be contented with reading the books of his companions on the science side. He left school in 1913 and spent the next year at Reading University as a preparation for Oxford where he entered New College in 1914 to read history. By this time the first world war had broken out and as he was opposed to warfare he joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit. His special interest in photography enabled him to work in the hospital x-ray department at first in York, but ultimately at the King George Hospital, London where he met a VAD, Stella Langston-Down and they fell in love. It was with her encouragement that he decided to do medicine and therefore he returned to New College in 1919 for the clinical course. He married Stella shortly before that course commenced, and graduated BM BCh (Oxon) in 1922. These details about Brain's early life have been included because of the remarkable fact that the man who ultimately became so distinguished as a physician specializing in neurology, and as an outstanding leader of the profession, not only as President of the Royal College of Physicians, but also as chairman of several professional and scientific bodies, should have entered the medical world only as the result of a war of which he strongly disapproved. His special interest in diseases of the nervous system and in psychological disorders commenced shortly after graduation and he was soon appointed to the staff of the Maida Vale Hospital, and of the London Hospital, and his publications, both papers and books, which were characterized by profound knowledge and lucid exposition, won him well-deserved fame. In addition to his pre-eminence as a physician, Russell Brain became renowned for his statesman-like qualities when in charge of committees or commissions, and also for his literary ability as an essayist and poet. When presiding over meetings his colleagues were always impressed by his grasp of the situation under discussion, and his ability to foretell the results of actions proposed, and he was thus enabled to lead by persuasion rather than by overriding power. He was President of the Royal College of Physicians during the difficult period of 1950-1957, and his success in that office led both to many other responsible appointments, and also to the award of honorary degrees by several universities, and Honorary Fellowships of Colleges at home and abroad, including the Honorary FRCS in 1958. Brain was a tireless worker, and besides his own numerous literary works he edited the journal *Brain* from 1954 till the time of his death. He thus had little time for leisure, but continued to supervise his garden even after he had not the time to work in it himself. He had an ideally happy family life with his wife Stella, their sons Christopher and Michael and daughter Janet. When he died after a short illness on 29 December 1966 his wife and family survived him.
Resource Identifier RCS: E005661
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
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