Search Results for Medical Obituaries - Narrowed by: Politician

First Title value, for Searching Singh, Chandra Bhan (1900 - )

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Sarah Gillam
Publication Date 2015-06-12 2018-02-21
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E007000-E007999/E007400-E007499
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/379652379652
Occupation General surgeon Politician
Details Chandra Bhan Singh was professor of surgery and anatomy at the Medical College, Agra, India. He was born in Akaltara, Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh on 12 January 1900, into a distinguished Rajput family. His father, Thakur Pachkour Singh, was a landlord; his mother was Swarn Kumari Devi Singh. He studied at Muir Central College, Allalabad and the King George's Medical College, Lucknow, and qualified in 1926. He gained his FRCS in 1932. He was professor of surgery and anatomy at the Medical College, Agra, convenor of the board of studies at the University of Agra, principal, senior superintendent and professor of surgery at GSVM Medical College, Kanpur, dean of the faculty of medicine, Lucknow University, and an examiner for medical colleges and universities throughout India. He was a member of the Medical Council of India. He retired in 1961 and two years later was elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, as a member of the Congress Party. He was convenor of the health standing committee from 1964 to 1965, and of the Madhya Pradesh Congress Party in Parliament. He was a member of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, and of the mental health advisory committee and the health education bureau of the government of India. He was married twice. His first wife, whom he married in 1921, died and in 1937 he married Winifred May De Souza. He had four sons and two daughters. Two of his sons followed him into the medical profession.
Resource Identifier RCS: E007469
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Wong, Soon Kai (1927 - 2017)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2022-02-03
JPEG Image
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E010000-E010999/E010000-E010099
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/385389385389
Occupation General surgeon Politician
Details Soon Wong was a surgeon and former minister of agriculture and social development in Malaysia. This is a draft obituary. If you have any information about this surgeon or are interested in writing this obituary, please email lives@rcseng.ac.uk
Resource Identifier RCS: E010071
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Dahrendorf, Ralf (1929 - 2009)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by John Blandy
Publication Date 2009-10-21
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E000000-E000999/E000700-E000799
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/372899372899
Occupation Politician sociologist
Details Ralf Dahrendorf was a German sociologist and politician who became director of the London School of Economics (LSE). He was born in Hamburg on 1 May 1929, the son of Lina and Gustav Dahrendorf, a member of the Social Democrat party in the Reichstag of 1932, where the Nazis had a majority. Just months later, in 1933, when Hitler gained power, Gustav was arrested. On his release he took his family to Berlin, but continued to work against the Nazis and was sentenced to seven years hard labour in 1944 for his part in a plot against Hitler. Meanwhile Ralf was printing pamphlets against the SS and, at the age of 16, was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, until he was released, starving, in 1945. Ralf entered Hamburg University to study classics, philosophy and social science, gaining his PhD in 1952. He was then awarded a Leverhulme scholarship to study at the LSE and gained his second PhD in 1956. In 1958 he returned to Hamburg as professor of sociology, and then went from one distinguished chair to another, at Columbia University, New York, Tübingen, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Harvard and Konstanz. He was elected to the Bundestag in 1969 when Brandt formed his first coalition government, and became a commissioner in the European Union in Brussels in 1970, which did not inhibit him from becoming one of its sharpest critics. In 1973 he was offered the chance to become director of the LSE. A year later he was invited by the BBC to give the Reith lecture, which he gave on the topic of liberty, survival and justice in a changing world. He was insistent that governments should plan for a period longer than the usual length of a parliament. After ten years at the LSE, he returned to his chair at Konstanz and then in 1986 spent a year in New York on a research grant. From 1988 to 1997 he was warden of St Antony’s College in Oxford. After becoming a naturalised British citizen in 1988 he joined the Liberal Democratic party and in 1993 received a life peerage. He was married three times, his first two marriages ending in divorce. By his first wife, Vera, he had three daughters – Nicola, Alexandra and Daphne. His second wife was Ellen and his third wife, Christine. He died on 17 June 2009.
Resource Identifier RCS: E000716
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Salisbury, Third Marquess of (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil) (1830 - 1903)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2012-10-31
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E003000-E003999/E003000-E003099
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/375259375259
Occupation Politician
Details For his Life by his third son, the Rt Hon Lord Algernon Robert Cecil, see the *Dictionary of National Biography,* Supplement ii.
Resource Identifier RCS: E003076
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Owen-Smith, Bertram (1922 - 2008)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Brian Morgan
Publication Date 2011-11-18 2016-02-12
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E001000-E001999/E001600-E001699
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/373808373808
Occupation Plastic surgeon Plastic and reconstructive surgeon Politician
Details Bertram Owen-Smith, or 'Owen' as he was known, was a plastic surgeon in the UK and later in Salisbury, Rhodesia. A member of the 'Guinea Pig Club', the group of injured Second World War airmen treated by the pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe, he made the unusual transition from patient to doctor; he studied medicine at King's College and then Westminster Hospital and later trained with McIndoe. He was born Bertram Owen Smith in Liverpool on 12 April 1922, one of the four children of an officer in Customs and Excise. When he was still a child the family returned to their home city, Swansea, and he attended Swansea Grammar School. He was primarily interested in sports, particularly rugby, left school at 17 and found a job in an insurance company. The Second World War broke out soon afterwards, the centre of Swansea was heavily bombed and so Owen moved to the short-staffed ambulance service. At the age of 18, he joined the RAF. He was sent to Canada for pilot training and was commissioned in April 1941. On 16 October 1941 he was piloting a Whitley V plane on a training sortie when one of the two engines failed just after take-off. He managed to land in a field, but the aircraft burst into flames. Owen, his co-pilot and the navigator were badly burned. He spent nearly two years as a patient at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, Sussex, where he was operated on by McIndoe, who was developing new techniques in facial reconstruction and plastic surgery. Smith became fascinated by McIndoe's work, decided to become a doctor and studied from his hospital bed. Meanwhile, in March 1943, he returned to duty. He completed a refresher course, but due to his injuries he was unable to resume operational flying. In November 1944 he resigned from the RAF with the rank of flight lieutenant. He went on to study medicine at King's College, London, and Westminster Hospital Medical School. He subsequently worked in hospitals in Bristol and Newcastle, and at the Royal Marsden Hospital. While at the Royal Marsden he asked to return to East Grinstead to learn the basics of plastic surgery, with the aim of helping his patients who needed radical surgery for cancer. In the event he stayed for three years and trained under McIndoe. In 1957 he emigrated to Salisbury, Rhodesia. Here he changed his name by deed poll and officially became 'Owen-Smith'. He treated burns victims, patients with skin cancer, children with cleft palates and victims of the guerilla war. In 1964, unhappy with a project to develop a new teaching hospital in Salisbury, he stood for election to the Rhodesian Parliament and was elected as an MP. He was one of Prime Minister Ian Smith's backbenchers when UDI (the unilateral declaration of independence) was announced in November 1965. In 1982 he returned to Britain and settled in Pentregat, Dyfed. In 1943 he married Rickie Pritchard. They divorced in 1967 and later that year he married Bobbie Mitchell, the chief nurse in his practice. Bobbie died in 2005. Bertram Owen-Smith died on 6 June 2008, aged 86. He was survived by his four sons and daughter by his first marriage.
Resource Identifier RCS: E001625
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Dalrymple, Donald (1814 - 1873)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2011-09-14
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E001000-E001999/E001300-E001399
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/373554373554
Occupation General surgeon Politician
Details Born at Norwich, the third son of William Dalrymple, the eminent surgeon of that city, and brother of John Dalrymple (qv) and Archibald Dalrymple (qv). He was educated in Norwich, at Guy's Hospital, and in Paris. He practised in Norwich till his retirement in 1863, and was at one time Surgeon-Accoucheur to the Norwich Lying-in Charity, and Senior Surgeon to the local Hospital for Sick Children. He was also proprietor of and Surgeon to the Heigham Retreat Lunatic Asylum, and Hon Curator of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum. In 1860-1861 he was Sheriff of Norwich; he was also a Magistrate and Deputy Lieutenant for Norfolk, and Chairman of the Governors of King Edward's Schools at Norwich. In 1868 he became Member of Parliament for Bath, and was thus the second MP among the Fellows, the first having been William James Clement (qv). He was chiefly remembered in the House of Commons as the promoter of the Habitual Drunkards Bill, which was based on the recommendations of the Select Committee of 1872 on Habitual Drunkards. The Bill met with considerable opposition, and its passage was delayed owing to the Government imbroglio on the Irish University question. Donald Dalrymple did not, at any rate, see the fruits of his labours, for he died suddenly on September 19th, 1873, at Coldeast, near Southampton, the seat of Count Montefiore, where he was a member of a shooting party. His photograph is in the College Collection.
Resource Identifier RCS: E001371
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Amory, Derick Heathcoat, 1st Viscount (1899 - 1981)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-10-31
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E006000-E006999/E006200-E006299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/378434378434
Occupation Politician
Details Derick Heathcoat Amory was born on 26 December 1899 and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He entered Parliament in 1945 as the Member for Tiverton, Devon, and represented the constituency for fifteen years. He held numerous parliamentary appointments including Minister for Pensions, Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and, from 1958 to 1960, Chancellor of the Exchequer. He became High Commissioner for the United Kingdom in Canada, 1961-1963 and was presented with an honorary LLD from McGill University. British universities also honoured him and, in 1972, he was appointed Chancellor of Exeter University. The College made him an Honorary Fellow in 1974 when the annual meeting was held at Exeter. He died on 20 January 1981 aged 82 years.
Resource Identifier RCS: E006251
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Primrose, Archibald Philip, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847 - 1929)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-10-04
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/376668376668
Occupation Politician
Details Born on 7 May 1847, the eldest son of Archibald, Lord Dalmeny, who died in 1851, and Lady Catherine Stanhope, daughter of the 4th Earl Stanhope, afterwards Duchess of Cleveland. He succeeded his grandfather as Earl of Rosebery in 1868. Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, and Lord President of the Council, March 1894- June 1895. He married in 1878 Hannah, daughter of Baron Mayer de Rothschild. He died 21 May 1929. Lord Rosebery was elected an Honorary Fellow at the Centenary of the College in 1900.
Resource Identifier RCS: E004485
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Cronin, John Desmond (1916 - 1986)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2015-05-08
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E007000-E007999/E007200-E007299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/379405379405
Occupation Orthopaedic surgeon Politician
Details John Desmond Cronin was born on 1 March 1916, the son of John Patrick Cronin. He received his medical training at London University where he qualified in 1939. Thereafter he held house officer appointments at St Bartholomew's (1939-1940) and the Royal Free (1941-1942) Hospitals. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1942 and served as a surgical specialist in Burma, France and Germany until 1946. After the war he was appointed orthopaedic surgeon at the Prince of Wales Hospital from 1947 to 1951 and in 1948 held a similar post at the French Hospital. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in 1960 and an Officier in 1967. He joined the Labour Party in 1947 and for a time was adviser on industrial injuries to a number of trade unions. In 1950 he became vice-chairman of the North St Pancras Labour Party and was a member of the LCC from 1952 to 1955. He then became Member of Parliament for Loughborough from 1955 until 1979 and was Opposition Whip from 1959 to 1962. He married Cora Mumby-Croft (daughter of Rowland Mumby-Croft) in 1941 and they had a son, Charles and two daughters, Anne and Pauline. On 3 January 1986 he was found dead near his home in Hampshire and it was thought that he might have had a heart attack after falling from his horse.
Resource Identifier RCS: E007222
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Permewan, William (1865 - 1926)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2012-09-26 2022-06-01
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E002000-E002999/E002900-E002999
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/375115375115
Occupation ENT surgeon General surgeon Politician
Details Born at Redruth, the son of John Permewan and Jane Permewan née Thomas. Both his father and his older brother Arthur Edward Permewan were medical practitioners. He studied at University College Hospital, and was then Resident Surgeon to the Miners’ Hospital, Redruth. In 1887 he went to Liverpool, where he became Surgeon to the David Lewis Northern Hospital and Northern Dispensary. Later he took up laryngology, and was Surgeon to the Throat and Ear Department of the Southern Hospital and to the Southport Infirmary. In 1914 he was appointed Lecturer in Laryngology to the University of Liverpool, and he wrote much on diseases of the nose, throat, and ear. He practised at 31 Rodney Street, but he became chiefly known as a politician on the City Council, representing the Abereromby Ward from 1901-1907. In 1910 as a Liberal and Home Ruler he fought one of the keenest political battles in the history of Liverpool against the Unionist Candidate, F E Smith, later Lord Birkenhead. He wrote articles in the *Fortnightly Review*, and failed in a second attempt to enter Parliament. Later as an old-fashioned Liberal he supported Conservative candidates against Socialists. Permewan was a brilliant conversationalist and debated with a splendid voice which, if he had trained, might have gained him a reputation as a singer. During the War (1914-1918) he served as Captain RAMC (T) at the Western General Hospital. After six months of ill health he died on March 9th, 1926, and his funeral was attended by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and other dignitaries. He was survived by his widow, Stella, a sister of the chemist and politician Sir Max Muspratt, whom he married in 1901. They had a brilliant daughter, Gwendolen Philippa, who died seven weeks before her father, and a son, William Muspratt.
Resource Identifier RCS: E002932
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Menzies, Sir Robert Gordon (1894 - 1978)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Sir Barry Jackson
Publication Date 2015-02-10 2018-05-24
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E006000-E006999/E006700-E006799
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/378931378931
Occupation Lawyer Politician
Details Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia for eighteen years and a Commonwealth statesman of acknowledged world status, was born of humble origin on 20 December 1894 at Jeparit, Victoria. He was of Scottish-Cornish ancestry, his father being a general store keeper. He was educated at Grenville College Ballarat, Wesley College Melbourne and Melbourne University. A brilliant scholar, he graduated LLM in 1917 with first class honours and the Supreme Court Judges' Prize. He was called to the Victoria Bar in 1918 and rapidly established a wide reputation, becoming King's Counsel in 1929 at the exceptionally early age of 34. He entered politics in 1928 when elected to the Victoria Legislative Council and was appointed Minister without Portfolio. In 1929 he entered the Legislative Assembly and in 1932 became Attorney General, Minister for Railways and Deputy Prime Minister. He was appointed Commonwealth Attorney General in 1935 and became Prime Minister for his first term of office in 1939 at the age of 44. He held this position for two years before resigning when he felt he had lost the confidence of his colleagues. He returned to office in December 1949 and remained Prime Minister for sixteen consecutive years before resigning in January 1966. During this time he became one of the best known Premiers, travelling widely and being a great supporter of the Commonwealth and a firm friend of Britain. An account of his distinguished political career must be sought elsewhere. A man of imposing presence with great verbal fluency, a conversationalist, mimic and wit, he was a personal friend of the Royal Family and was a guest at the Queen's Coronation in 1953. Two years earlier he had been made a Companion of Honour and in 1963 the Queen conferred upon him the rare distinction of a Knighthood of the Order of the Thistle. In 1965 he was made Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and in 1976 he was created a Knight of the Order of Australia. He was pall bearer at Sir Winston Churchill's funeral. Sir Robert was admitted an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England by the President, Lord Brock, on 28 June 1965, Sir Arthur Porritt (later Lord Porritt) gave the citation. His relaxations were walking and cricket; he was a member of the MCC and President of the Lords Taverners in 1962 and President of the Kent County Cricket Club in 1968. When he died the *Sydney Bulletin* referred to his death under the caption 'The long innings is over'. He died on 15 May 1978, aged 83, and was survived by his wife, Dame Patty Menzies, whom he married in 1920 and by his son and daughter, one son having predeceased him in 1974.
Resource Identifier RCS: E006748
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Shawcross, Lord Hartley William (1902 - 2003)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2006-06-21 2006-10-11
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E000000-E000999/E000200-E000299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/372435372435
Occupation Politician
Details Hartley Shawcross, a barrister, Labour politician and an honorary fellow of the College, will be perhaps best remembered as the leading British prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. He was born on 4 February 1902, the son of John and Hilda Shawcross. He was educated at Dulwich College, the London School of Economics and the University of Geneva. He was called to the bar in 1925. He successfully stood for Parliament as a Labour candidate in 1945 and immediately became Attorney General. From 1945 to 1949 he was Britain’s principal UN delegate, as well as Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg. He later served as President of the Board of Trade before leaving politics and resigning from Parliament in 1958. He went on to help found the University of Sussex and served as chancellor there from 1965 to 1985. He a board member of several major companies. He married three times. His first wife, Alberta Rosita Shyvers, died in 1944. He then married Joan Winifred Mather, by whom he had two sons and a daughter (who became a doctor). In 1997, at the age of 95, he married Susanne Monique Huiskamp. Tall, handsome and with a commanding presence, Shawcross was a most distinguished member of his party, and a good friend to the College.
Resource Identifier RCS: E000248
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Sebastian, Sir Cuthbert Montraville (1921 - 2017)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Desmond Fosbery
Publication Date 2017-04-21 2017-07-12
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E009000-E009999/E009300-E009399
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/381524381524
Occupation Diplomat General surgeon Medical Officer Obstetrician and gynaecologist Politician
Details Sir Cuthbert Montraville Sebastian was governor general of Saint Christopher and Nevis. He was born in the Caribbean, on the island of Saint Kitts (as the island of Saint Christopher is commonly known), on 22 October 1921. His father, Joseph Matthew Sebastian, founded the labour movement on Saint Kitts and also established the first national newspaper. His mother was Inez Veronica Sebastian née Hodge. On completing his secondary schooling, young Cuthbert, affectionately known as 'Cutie' to his family and friends, was apprenticed to the Cunningham Hospital on Saint Kitts as a learner-dispenser. Under the tutelage of variously appointed British Colonial Administration surgeons and physicians during the 1930's, he completed his early years at that institution, becoming a trained dispenser and surgeon's assistant. His duties also included being mortuary attendant and autopsy assistant. At times he was instructed by the surgeon to 'just carry-on' for a case of 'simple appendicitis' and so on, for which the chloroform anaesthetic would be administered by the matron. During the Second World War, Sebastian enlisted in the Royal Air Force and was undergoing training in Canada as a rear-gunner at the time of the cessation of hostilities in 1945. Upon returning home, he continued his studies and won an entrance scholarship to Mount Allison University in Canada, where he obtained a BSc degree in 1953. This achievement led to his gaining a place at Dalhousie University Medical School in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in 1958 he gained his Canadian medical degree. After his pre-registration year, he returned home to work in the Government Health Service as a medical officer, and was appointed variously to each of the islands of Saint Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla in turn. During this period, there would usually be only one doctor on an island with a population of under 10,000. In 1962, he went to Britain and spent the next four years training in surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology at Dundee Royal Infirmary. His colleagues there included Malcolm 'Callum' Macnaughton and Narendra 'Naren' Patel, both of whom became presidents of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Returning to St Kitts in 1966, Sebastian was appointed as medical superintendent and obstetrician gynaecologist to the Cunningham Hospital, the same institution where some 30 years earlier he had started his apprenticeship at 'a shilling per day in lieu of rations'. When the Cunningham Hospital was closed in 1967, he took the same positions at the newly commissioned 164-bed Joseph N France General Hospital. Between 1970 and 1980 he served whenever necessary as surgeon and also as chief medical officer, in addition to his other hospital duties. It was in 1973 that I first met and worked with Sebastian when I was appointed as a surgeon specialist. Being the only two surgeons in the country, and with no junior staff, we worked closely together, often conferring over major cases and joining each other across the table in the only operating theatre at the hospital. In 1978, he was instrumental in obtaining the necessary funding and authorisation to establish and construct a twin operating theatre suite at the hospital, a project which moved swiftly to completion with his invaluable support and enthusiasm. This was aided no doubt in part by our joint appointment as attending surgeon to the then premier, Robert L Bradshaw. In December 1995 Sebastian retired from medical practice and, on 1 January 1996, was appointed governor general of the Federation of Saint Christopher and Nevis, and Her Majesty's representative. In the same New Year's honours, Her Majesty conferred upon him the rank of Knight Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George. Also in his retirement, Sir Cuthbert became instrumental in organising the Caribbean's first established telemedicine service, between Saint Kitts and the Dalhousie Medical School in Nova Scotia, such was his continuing enthusiasm for technological advances in his chosen profession. In March 2001 Sir Cuthbert was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons at a joint meeting of the Royal College of Surgeons and the University of the West Indies in Barbados, and in 2002 received an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. I held Sir Cuthbert Sebastian's professional and personal achievements in the highest regard. It was my pleasure to have him as a colleague and friend for over 40 years - one of the worthy 'old school surgeons'. Sir Cuthbert Sebastian died on 25 March 2017. He was 95. He was survived by his three sons and three daughters.
Resource Identifier RCS: E009341
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Cooke, Sir James Douglas (1879 - 1949)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-06-06
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E004000-E004999/E004000-E004099
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/376251376251
Occupation General surgeon Politician
Details Born at Melbourne in 1879, eldest child of John Cooke, pasturalist, who had formerly lived in New Zealand, and Edith Marshall, his wife. He was educated at Melbourne University, where he qualified in 1901, and served as house physician at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. He took the BS in 1902 and then came to the London Hospital, where he served as house surgeon and resident anaesthetist. He took the English Conjoint qualification at the end of 1903, and the Fellowship in 1905. Cooke practised for many years with success at Stanmore, Middlesex. During the 1914-18 war he served in the RAMC, was promoted major in 1918, and was mentioned in despatches. He took a prominent part in local social life and politics, and in 1929 stood as a Conservative candidate for Parliament at Peckham. At the general election of 1931 he was returned as MP for South Hammersmith, which he represented until 1945. His principal interest was the promotion of trade between the countries of the Empire. He was knighted in 1945. Cooke married in 1907 Elsie Muriel, daughter of General James Burston of Melbourne, who survived him with a son and three daughters, one of whom married the eldest son and heir of Sir W E C Quilter, second baronet. Sir Douglas Cooke died on 13 July 1949 at 48 Kingston House, Princes Gate, SW7, a block of modern apartments looking over Kensington Gardens. He had previously lived at 35A Great Cumberland Place. His favourite recreations were tennis, golf, and shooting.
Resource Identifier RCS: E004068
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Vaughan, Sir Gerard Folliott (1923 - 2003)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2005-11-02 2006-10-11
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E000000-E000999/E000100-E000199
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/372345372345
Occupation Politician Psychiatrist
Details Sir Gerard Vaughan was a former Minister of State for Health in the Thatcher government. He was born on 11 June 1923 in Mozambique, Portugese East Africa, the son of a Welsh sugar planter who was more interested in big game hunting than sugar and was later killed in the RAF. Gerry was educated by a series of governesses, notably one Mafeta, who coached him through the matriculation at the age of 14. At first he wanted to become an artist and enrolled at the Slade and St Martin’s School of Art, but as war broke out he entered Guy’s Hospital to study medicine, helping in the casualty department during the Blitz. After qualifying, he became a house surgeon to Russell Brock, who encouraged him to become a surgeon, but suggested he learn some medicine first and take the MRCP. While doing a medical registrar job at the York clinic he became fascinated by psychiatry and went on to the Maudsley Hospital, returning to Guy’s as a consultant psychiatrist. There he became interested in the treatment of children and adolescents, particularly those with anorexia, and was responsible for the establishment of the Bloomfield clinic at Guy’s. Always interested in politics, Gerry sat on the London County Council as alderman for Streatham, becoming chairman of the strategy and planning group, and in 1970 he was elected MP for Reading. He was one of Ted Heath’s whips, and was Minister of State for Health for five years, first under Patrick Jenkin and later under Norman Fowler. He was knighted in 1984 on being dropped from the government. His views were on the extreme right, and among other things he championed homoeopathy. He died after a long illness on 29 July 2003, leaving a wife, Joyce Thurle, whom he married in 1955, and a son and daughter.
Resource Identifier RCS: E000158
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Boyle, Edward Charles Gurney, Lord Boyle of Handsworth (1923 - 1981)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-11-14
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E006000-E006999/E006300-E006399
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/378506378506
Occupation Politician
Details Edward Charles Gurney Boyle was born on 31 August 1923 and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1948 he was President of the Oxford Union. From 1959 to 1970 he was Member of Parliament for the Handsworth division of Birmingham. During this time he held numerous parliamentary appointments including Minister of Education from 1962 to 1964. He was Pro-Chancellor of Sussex University from 1965 to 1970 and Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University from 1970. A man of wide-ranging interests he served on many national and international committees and published work on education, politics and philosophy. Many universities awarded him honorary degrees and, in 1975, he was presented with an Honorary Fellowship on the occasion of the College's annual general meeting being held in Leeds. He died on 28 September 1981.
Resource Identifier RCS: E006323
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Henry, Mitchell (1826 - 1910)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2012-04-13
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E002000-E002999/E002200-E002299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/374386374386
Occupation Businessman General surgeon Politician
Details Born at Ardwick Green, Manchester, in 1826, he was the younger son of Alexander Henry (d1862), Liberal MP for South Lancashire, by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of George Brush of Dromore, Co Down, Ireland. Educated privately and at University College School in London. He afterwards joined the Pine Street School of Medicine at Manchester, which was subsequently incorporated with the medical department of the Owens College. He began to practise as a Consulting Surgeon at 5 Harley Street, London, W. He was elected Surgeon to the North London Infirmary for Diseases of the Eye in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, W. In 1857 he was elected Assistant Surgeon to the Middlesex Hospital, becoming Surgeon in 1858. He lectured on morbid anatomy and later on surgical jurisprudence. He abandoned his profession in 1862 and became a partner in the family firm of A & S Henry, merchants and general warehousemen, of Manchester and Huddersfield. In 1865 he contested Woodstock unsuccessfully in the Liberal interest, and was defeated at Manchester both at a by-election in 1867 and at the general election in 1868. During his second Manchester candidature he founded the *Evening News* as an electioneering sheet, and after his defeat sold it to William Evans. He finally entered Parliament in 1871 as Member for Co Galway, being a warm supporter of Isaac Butt and a Member of the Home Rule League. His first important speech in Parliament was in support of Butt's motion for an inquiry into the judgement of Mr Justice Keogh in the matter of the Galway election petition in 1872. He opposed Gladstone's Irish University Bill, and when Butt was ill in 1877 he became the Leader of the Irish Party in the House. When the Land League came into existence he supported Forster as opposed to Parnell, and was unseated at the general election in 1885. He was, however, returned to Parliament by the Blackfriars Division of Glasgow, voted against Gladstone's Home Rule Bill on June 7th, 1886, failed to obtain re-election at the general election in that year, and retired from Parliament. Meanwhile he had bought from the Blakes a large estate of some 14,000 acres, mostly bog, in Co Galway between Letterfrack and Galway, and at the edge of Kylemore Lough he built a stately house in the baronial style, which passed afterwards to the Duke of Manchester and is now a convent. Here he lived on good terms with the peasantry until the days of the Land League. The firm of A & S Henry became a limited company in 1889 and Mitchell Henry remained chairman till 1898. His interest in Ireland declined, Kylemore was sold, and he retired to Leamington, where he died on November 22nd, 1910. Mitchell Henry married in 1850 Margaret, daughter of George Vaughan, of Quilly House, Dromore, Co Down, by whom he had three sons and three daughters. His wife died before him, and in her memory he built a very beautiful chapel in the grounds of Kylemore which has survived the recent 'bad times'. A cartoon by 'Spy' appeared in *Vanity Fair* in 1879. Publications:- Although Henry soon deserted surgery for politics he wrote - "Description of a Brain with Deficient Corpus Callosum." - *Med-Chir Trans*, 1848, xxxi, 239. "Case of Abscess in Vesicula Seminalis perforating the Bladder Peritoneum." - *Ibid*, 1850, xxxiii, 307. Translation of Velpeau on "Diseases of the Breast" for the Sydenham Society.
Resource Identifier RCS: E002203
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Hastings, Somerville (1878 - 1967)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-08-11
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E005000-E005999/E005700-E005799
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/377961377961
Occupation ENT surgeon Politician
Details Somerville Hastings was born on 4 March 1878 at Warminster, Wiltshire, the son of the Rev H G Hastings. He was educated at Wycliffe College, Stonehouse, Wiltshire and at University College, London, where he won gold and silver medals for botany. He won an entrance scholarship to the Middlesex Hospital and was Governor's Prizeman. After qualifying in 1902 he held a variety of house appointments at the Middlesex and was assistant surgeon at the East London Hospital for Children and the London Throat Hospital. Later he became surgeon to the ear, nose and throat department at the Middlesex and was eventually consultant aural surgeon and lecturer in his specialty. During the first world war he served as a Captain in the RAMC and in the second world war in the Emergency Medical Service. Hastings was a member of the Association of Throat and Ear Surgeons of Great Britain and, with his fellow members, visited a number of clinics of note in Europe, including Paris, Strasbourg, Stockholm, Berne and Zurich. On these occasions there was much to be learned, not only from the formal demonstrations and operations, but from the extended discussions between members while travelling on the boat train from Victoria. He was vice-president of the Section of Laryngology at the British Medical Association annual meeting at Portsmouth in 1923 and was President of the Section of Laryngology of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1928-29. Hastings political career began in 1923 when he was returned as the first Labour Member of Parliament for Reading. Almost immediately he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Board of Education. However, he lost his seat in 1924, but regained it in the general election of 1929, only to be defeated in 1931 and again in 1935. At this time he was also active in local government and in 1932 he was elected as a Labour member of the London County Council, representing Mile End, which he continued to serve until 1946. From 1932 to 1934 he was chairman of the LCC Hospitals and Welfare Committee and chairman of the LCC itself 1944-5. Problems of welfare and housing were always of interest to him, and as early as 1929 he had promoted the idea of a national health service. This was one of the aims of the Socialist Medical Association, of which he was a founder member and its first president until 1951. Hastings also served on the public health advisory committee of the Labour Party. At the general election of 1945 he stood as Labour candidate for the Barking constituency, which he won and retained at the subsequent general elections of 1950, 1951 and 1950. He decided not to stand again in the election of 1959, but in the following year he was made a Freeman of Barking in recognition of his services to the constituency. Hastings was a shy man with a boyish enthusiasm for all that he did and an unshakeable conviction that medical advice should be freely available to all. He had strong Christian principles and was a teetotaller, although when acting as a host he never saw fit to impose his views on alcohol upon his guests. He was a keen amateur botanist and was the author of several books on botany, including Summer flowers of the High Alps, Wild flowers at home, Toadstools at home and Alpine plants at home. Hastings married Bessie Tuke, fourth daughter of W C Tuke of Manchester. They had one son and one daughter. Mrs Hastings died in 1958. Somerville Hastings died at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, on 7 July 1967, aged 89.
Resource Identifier RCS: E005778
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching De Souza, Wilfred Anthony (1927 - 2015)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Grace de Souza
Publication Date 2015-09-15 2015-12-14
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E008000-E008999/E008000-E008099
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/380258380258
Occupation General surgeon Politician
Details Wilfred Anthony de Souza was a general surgeon in Goa and chief minister of the state on three occasions. He was born on 23 April 1927 at Vagator, Anjuna, a small village in north Goa, the son of Tito Fermino de Souza, a doctor, and Alina Ana Maria de Souza. In 1930 Wilfred's father went to Kampala, Uganda, to substitute for a colleague who was proceeding to England for further studies. In 1932, Alina Ana Maria, along with her sons, Wilfred and Orlando, joined her husband in Kampala, and Wilfred was enrolled in the Norman Godinho Goan School. In 1936 he transferred to the Government Indian School in the fifth grade. In 1941, Wilfred and his elder brother Romuald, who had joined the family in Kampala, returned to Goa and registered in the St Thomas High School in Aldona to take the matriculation examination of Bombay University. On passing the matriculation examination, Wilfred joined the Karnataka College in Dharwad and was there for two years while he completed the inter science examination of Bombay University. In 1944 he joined the Nair College of Medicine and earned the licentiate in medicine and was an intern at St George Hospital in Bombay in 1948. He continued his medical studies and completed his MB BS degree in 1953. He then went to the United Arab Emirates as a personal physician to the ruling sheikhs. In May 1957 he proceeded to England to pursue postgraduate studies in general surgery, after which he worked in several hospitals in the UK prior to taking his fellowship exams. In March 1961 he gained his fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and in May 1961 he was awarded the fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. On 4 February 1963 Wilfred returned to India, choosing to work in Goa. At this time Goa was going through a period of transition after its integration into the Indian union after over 450 years of Portuguese rule. There were a number of well-qualified physicians in Goa, but no surgeons. In case of surgical emergencies, Goans had to depend on Goan surgeons from Bombay, who travelled to Goa on weekends to perform surgeries, or alternatively the patients had to travel to Bombay for surgical help. Wilfred decided to provide surgical treatment in Goa itself, even though there were many difficulties, including a lack of proper equipment. In 1964 he was appointed as director of the Asilo Hospital Mapusa (north Goa), while simultaneously lecturing and practising at Goa Medical College, Panjim, Ribandar Hospital and Hospicio Hospital, Margao (south Goa). Travel between the hospitals was very difficult: there were no proper roads and no bridges, so a ferry had to be taken across two rivers. In 1969 he moved into private practice and continued until he was over 70. His love for his motherland, which brought him back to Goa, was the main reason for his foray into Goan politics, which began with the United Goan Party. He played an important part in the emotionally charged Opinion Poll of 1967. The ruling Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party had the idea of merging Goa with the state of Maharashtra, which would mean that Goans would have no say in the ruling of their state, no language to call their own and would lose their identity as a people. Goans won the Opinion Poll. Wilfred played a stellar role in the recognition of Konkani as the official language and the granting of statehood, battles that were long and complex. Wilfred was a larger-than-life character in the political arena of Goa. As well as his considerable contribution as a medical practitioner and surgeon, he was also a superb health minister, the best Goa has had. The Goa Medical College and Hospital complex in Bambolim is a prime testament of his vision. The credit for Goa becoming a premier health destination today goes to Wilfred. He became the chief minister of the state in 1993, after having won his first election from his home constituency of Saligao in 1989. Wilfred de Souza was recognised for his many contributions in various fields. Among other awards, in 1993 he gained the Rajiv Gandhi Excellence Award. A year later, he was awarded the Eminent Goan Award of the Goa Cultural and Social Centre, and in 1995 he was presented with the Jawaharlal Nehru Excellence Award from the Institute of Economic Studies, New Delhi. In 1997 he was awarded the prestigious Dr B C Roy Award of the Medical Council of India. On 29 September 2000 he was made an honorary fellow of the International College of Surgeons. Outside medicine, his hobbies were philately, coin collecting, reading and playing the stock market. In April 1962 he married Grace Goodwin. They were married for over 53 years. Wilfred de Souza died on 4 September 2015. He was 88. He was survived by his widow and by their two daughters, Joanne and Suzie. In recognition of his services to the nation, the Government of Goa accorded him a state funeral with three days of state mourning.
Resource Identifier RCS: E008075
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874 - 1965)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-10-30
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E006000-E006999/E006200-E006299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/378404378404
Occupation Politician
Details Winston Churchill was born on 30 November 1874 the elder son of Lord Randolph Churchill, third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough and his American wife Jeanette Jerome; Lord Randolph was a prominent politician who died young, and Lady Randolph was one of the great beauties of her time. He was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst; after seeing active service in India, Egypt and South Africa, and writing as a war correspondent, he entered Parliament as a Conservative in 1900, but joined the Liberal party in 1906. He held many high ministerial offices between 1907 and 1929, and was appointed a Privy Councillor in 1907. During the first world war he also served for a time with the Army in France. After the split in the Liberal party he rejoined the Conservatives, but was kept out of office during the thirties, since his attitude to world politics was out of line with that of the leaders of the party. He had already written many books, chiefly of contemporary history, and during these years made his mark as a scholar by his masterly biography of his famous ancestor Marlborough (4 vols. 1933-38). With the outbreak of war in 1939 he returned to office, and became the great architect of victory over Nazi Germany as Prime Minister 1941-45; he was again Prime Minister 1951-55. He had been created a Companion of Honour in 1922, and was raised to the Order of Merit in 1946. He refused all titled honours except the Garter which he received from the Queen in 1953. Churchill was elected an Honorary Fellow of the College at the centenary celebrations in 1943. He married in 1908, and died on 24 January 1965 aged 90, survived by his wife, with their son and three daughters. Sir Winston Churchill's connection with the College is described in the *Annals* 1956, 18, pages 339 and 394, and 1965, 36, page 129.
Resource Identifier RCS: E006221
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Page, Sir Earle Christmas Grafto (1880 - 1961)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-04-07
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E005000-E005999/E005200-E005299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/377413377413
Occupation General surgeon Politician
Details Born at Grafton, New South Wales on 8 August 1880, son of Charles Page, coach-builder, and his wife Mary Cox, both his parents being Australian born and inheriting from their parents a tradition of public service, he qualified from the University of Sydney in 1902, was a resident at the Prince Alfred Hospital under Scott Skirving and Alexander MacCormick, and thereafter practised at Grafton, half-way between Sydney and Brisbane. He became Mayor of Grafton in 1918 as his father had been in 1908. By 1914 he had become the leading consultant in the Northern Rivers district of New South Wales, and was a pioneer of abdominal surgery with a very good record. During the first world war he served in France and Egypt with the 3rd Australian General Hospital and the 3rd Casualty Clearing Station. Page entered Federal politics as MP for Cowper in 1919, helped to found the Country Party, and soon received office. He was acting Prime Minister on several occasions before appointment as Prime Minister in 1939, but his Government was brief. His best contributions to Australia were made as Treasurer in the 1920s, when he set the financial relations of the Commonwealth and State governments on a sound basis with an independent Central Bank, as Minister of Commerce in the thirties and early forties, and as Minister of Health in the fifties when he established the National Health Service. He travelled widely to study differing Health Services, and achieved a compromise between governmental and independent insurance schemes which suited the temper of Australian politics and allowed for variations between the States. An account of the Service which he pioneered appeared in the *British Medical Journal* for 10 February 1962, shortly after his death. Page was a dynamic character who split his own Country Party in 1939. After his important special mission to London, where he represented Australia in the Imperial War Cabinet in the darkest days of the second world war (1941-42), he was co-opted to the Australian War Cabinet by John Curtin, the Labour premier. Page was always an advocate of Federal action, and was interested to promote development of national resources and national education, as well as national health. He hoped to see a better integrated Australian Commonwealth of more and smaller States. He was the first Chancellor of the University of New England at Armidale. He was himself a successful pastoralist, developing large tracts of virgin land in New South Wales and Queensland. He travelled widely, "rushing around to make time to be lazy". Page married first in 1906 Ethel Blunt, who died in 1958 leaving three sons and a daughter; the eldest son was Ivon Page FRCS, FRACS; one son had died earlier. He married secondly in 1958 Jean Thomas, who survived him. He died on 20 December 1961 aged 81.
Resource Identifier RCS: E005230
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Johnstone, Sir Robert James (1872 - 1938)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-07-24
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E004000-E004999/E004200-E004299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/376446376446
Occupation Obstetrician and gynaecologist Politician
Details Born at Greenisland, Co Antrim, where his family had lived for many generations, on 4 January 1872, the only son and eldest child of Charles Johnstone, land owner, and Mary McCreavy, his wife. He was educated at the Belfast Academical Institution, and at Queen's College, Belfast, where he was a scholar in 1891, 1892, and 1894, Dunville student in 1895, and Coulter exhibitioner and first medallist at the BA examination. He served as house surgeon at the Royal Victoria Hospital as soon as he was qualified, was demonstrator of anatomy at Queen's College, and was appointed to a studentship in pathology under Professor Lorraine Smith in 1896. He then took postgraduate courses in London and Vienna, and on his return, having determined to devote himself to the diseases of women, acted as assistant to Sir John Byers from 1900. He was soon appointed surgeon to the Belfast Maternity Hospital, and in 1902 was elected assistant gynaecologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital, becoming surgeon in 1908 and professor of gynaecology at the University in succession to Sir John Byers in 1921. When the Parliament of Northern Ireland was established in 1921 Johnstone was chosen to represent Queen's University in the Ulster House of Commons. He did much good work in this position, and took an active part as a member of the Royal Commission which issued a report upon which the Education Act in Northern Ireland was afterwards based. His parliamentary record also included the chairmanship of the commission on local government services in Northern Ireland; this commission in 1927 issued a survey of the existing system, which revealed its limitations and outlined a comprehensive scheme of reform. He did equally good work at the British Medical Association which he joined in 1897. For seven years he was secretary of the Ulster branch, of which he was president in 1921, and in 1937 he was elected president of the Association when the annual meeting was held in Belfast. During his year of office he received the honour of knighthood. From 1927 until his death he represented Queen's University on the General Medical Council, and from 1934 he was a member of the Dental Board. He took a prominent part in the inception of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, was a foundation Fellow, and was elected to the Council. In freemasonry he was always interested, was one of the founders and was the first master of the Queen's University Lodge. On 8 August 1906 he married Florence, daughter of the Rev G Magill, Presbyterian minister of Cliftonville. She survived him, but without children. He died at Newcastle, Co Down on 25 October 1938. Sir Robert Johnstone held a high position in the medical profession. He was loved and trusted by all his contemporaries, both for his social and professional attainments. Fostered by his friend and former master, Edward Russell, he had a sound knowledge of the classics and could read Greek and Latin poetry with pleasure. He was for two successive years captain of the Royal County Down. Golf Club. He early enlisted in the University Volunteer Force, and during the first world war he was engaged daily in its duties, without a commission and as a voluntary worker. Publications: Obstetrics and gynaecology, in Whitla's *Dictionary of treatment*, 6th edition, London, 1920. Caesarean section, with a record of 28 cases. *Trans Ulster med Soc* 1914-15, pp 99-114. Renal decapsulation in puerperal eclampsia. *Practitioner*, 1908, 80, 797.
Resource Identifier RCS: E004263
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Howse, Sir Neville Reginald (1863 - 1930)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-07-17
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E004000-E004999/E004200-E004299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/376417376417
Occupation General surgeon Politician
Details Born 26 October 1863 at Stogursey, Somerset, the second surviving son of Alfred Howse, MRCS (see the memoir of C B Howse, above). He was educated at Fulland's School, Taunton, and afterwards entered the London Hospital, where he served as house surgeon to E Hurry Fenwick. He went to New South Wales in 1897, where he practised for two years, until in October 1899 he volunteered during the South African War. He received a commission as captain in the New South Wales Medical Staff Corps, and saw much service in the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal. He was present at the actions of Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Diamond Hill in June, and in those of Bethlehem and Witherby in July 1900. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery at Vredfort on 24 July 1900, when he carried a wounded man to safety in face of heavy cross fire, and at the end of the campaign received the Queen's medal with six clasps and the King's medal with two clasps, having been promoted major. He returned to New South Wales at the end of the war, practised at Orange, and married in 1905 Evelyn Northcote, eldest daughter of G de Vial Pilcher, of Newstead, Orange, New South Wales, who survived him with two sons and two daughters. His brother, C B Howse, FRCS, joined him in partnership at Orange in 1908. During the world war he was appointed in 1914 principal medical officer of the Australian naval and military expedition to German New Guinea and the Pacific isles with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He next went to Egypt with the first Australian Division, was promoted colonel and was made Assistant Director of Medical Services. In this capacity he was responsible for the arrangements of Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Auxiliary Corps) at Gallipoli, was mentioned in despatches in the London Gazette of 5 August 1915 and was decorated CB, being promoted to KCB two years later. In November 1915 he became Surgeon-General and Director of the Australian and New Zealand medical forces, and shortly afterwards became Medical Director-General of the Australian Imperial Forces. He held this position until 1919, and was rewarded with a Knighthood of the most distinguished Order of St Michael and St George. From 1919 to 1922 he was Director-General of the Australian Army Medical Service, and on his retirement was promoted to the rank of major-general. He entered the Commonwealth House of Representatives in 1922, and held office successively as Minister for Defence, Minister for Health, and Minister for Home and Territories. In 1923 he was one of the Australian representatives at the fourth Assembly of the League of Nations, and for a time was looked upon as a likely successor to Sir Joseph Cook, the High Commissioner for Australia in London. Howse died in London on 21 September 1930, and was buried at All Souls Cemetery, Kensal Rise. He was possessed of a dynamic personality, for he worked and played at high speed, hated slackness, and never suffered fools gladly. He had great gifts of organization and administration, his decisions were rapid and fearless, and he never shirked responsibility. As a doctor he was a shrewd diagnostician with a strong bias towards surgery; as a statesman he had ever before him the advancement of medicine, and the newly established Royal Australasian College of Surgeons owed much to his efforts. In character he was utterly without fear, was always ready to take a risk, and on the field of battle he seemed to bear a charmed life. He was a poor speaker, curiously modest, hating ostentation and worshipping efficiency.
Resource Identifier RCS: E004234
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Lumley, Lawrence Roger, 11th Earl of Scarborough (1896 - 1969)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-09-11
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E005000-E005999/E005900-E005999
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/378088378088
Occupation Politician
Details Lawrence Roger Lumley was born on 27 July 1896 and was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1916 he interrupted his studies to serve in France with the 11th Hussars and was wounded in March 1918. In 1922 he entered Parliament as member for Hull East, but lost the seat in the landslide of 1929. However, in 1931 he was returned as member for his native city of York which he represented till he went out to Bombay as Governor in 1937. This was a period of political trouble in India, but the warm personal regard in which he was held, and the part played by Lady Lumley, prevented any serious outbreaks in his region. He returned home in 1943 and within two years had succeeded his uncle as the 11th Earl of Scarborough. The many important appointments, including that of Lord Chamberlain of the Household (1952-63) testify to his outstanding qualities of character and statesmanship, but it was through his life-long attachment to freemasonry that the College came to benefit from his interest. While he was Grand Master of English Freemasonry, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Grand Lodge it was resolved that something important should be done which would help the world, yet be outside their own rank of freemasonry. It was at his suggestion that the help should be given to the research work of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a sum of £542,000 was collected to be held in trust for the College, the interest from this capital sum to go to support the work of the College. It was therefore a fitting acknowledgement of the gratitude of the College for his special interest that he was admitted to the Honorary Fellowship in June 1967. Lord Scarborough's magnificent career, a life devoted to the service of his country and the welfare of his fellows, ended with his death on 29 June 1969.
Resource Identifier RCS: E005905
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching O'Regan, John Arthur Rolland (1904 - 1992)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2015-09-25
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E008000-E008999/E008200-E008299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/380422380422
Occupation General practitioner General surgeon Politician
Details John Arthur Rolland O'Regan (Ro) was born in Wellington on 1 June 1904, the son of Mr Justice O'Regan. He was educated at St Patrick's College, Wellington, and graduated from the Otago Medical School in 1928. He was house surgeon at Wellington Hospital and went to London in 1929 for surgical training. He was resident surgical officer at Poplar Hospital and at the Seamens' Hospital, Greenwich. He obtained his FRCS in 1931. O'Regan returned to Wellington in 1933 in general practice in the central area and then as a surgeon, being surgeon to Wellington Hospital (1936-60) and to the Home of Compassion, Island Bay (1933-63). Essentially he was a general surgeon with a special interest in cancer. In 1938 he became FRACS and later was a college and university examiner in surgery. He was President of the Cancer Society of New Zealand from 1963 to 1965. After retiring from the hospital he was chief medical officer to the New Zealand Railways from 1960 to 1965. He saw war service as surgeon to the hospital ships *Manganui*, *Oranje* and *Pacific Star*. He was present at the signing of the Japanese surrender in 1946 on Tokyo Bay aboard the USS *Missouri*. He inherited from his father a strong interest in social justice which he reinforced by wide reading. He was prepared to back any issue that he thought should activate all citizens. The abandonment of racist exclusions in sport, the war in Vietnam and nuclear disarmament were all espoused with vigour. On final retirement from surgery he had a second career in local government but failed to be elected to Parliament in 1966 as a Labour candidate. He served on the Wellington City Council from 1965 to 1974 where he was able to apply his great expertise in rating and land value. His book *Rating in New Zealand* is a reference on the subject. As he had been fond of the harbour since childhood he was happy in being a long-serving member of the Wellington Harbour Board, and chair from 1972 to 1974. Also he was one of the three members of the Sheehan Commission of Enquiry into Maori Reserve Land and wrote its report in 1974. O'Regan was a striking character graced with high intelligence and gifted with power in communication. While strongly assertive he was also genial and compassionate. A strong but independent loyalty was given to his religious faith and he was a founding member of the Guild of St Luke and SS Cosmas and Damian, to which he contributed considerably. He made his mark not only in his profession but in the wider community. An extensively read man since childhood, his declining years were sad as he lost his sight with macular degeneration and a succession of strokes eroded his verbal fluency. O'Regan married Rena Bradshaw of the Ngai Tahu people in London in 1932, and they had two sons and one daughter. Rena died in 1966 after thirty years of marriage. Three years later O'Regan married an old friend, Lena Dowling, who helped greatly with his disability. Lena died three weeks after O'Regan, who died on 20 November 1992.
Resource Identifier RCS: E008239
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Exeter, David George Brownlow Cecil, Marquess of (1905 - 1981)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-12-01
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E006000-E006999/E006400-E006499
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/378671378671
Occupation Athlete Politician
Details Lord Burghley, as he was better known in his youth, was born on 5 February, 1905 the eldest son and heir of the fifth Marquess of Exeter, KG, and a descendent of Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I. He was educated at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge. His athletic ability soon became famous and he won every honour open to him, at Cambridge, in the AAA championships and in the Olympics. While he was an undergraduate he ran round the Great Court at Trinity College while the clock was striking mid-day, covering the distance of 380 yards in 42½ seconds. In the film *Chariots of fire* this feat was erroneously attributed to Lord Exeter's fellow athlete, Harold Abrahams. His best known victory was in 1928 in the 400 metres hurdles when the Olympic Games were held in Amsterdam. In 1931 he entered Parliament as a Conservative Member for the Peterborough Division of Northamptonshire and held the seat until 1943, though on the outbreak of war he announced that he would not stand again. During the war he served first in the Army as a Staff Captain Tank Supply in 1940, as Major DAD in 1941 and Lieutenant-Colonel AD in 1942. He was then appointed Controller of American Supplies and Repairs at the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1943 and shortly afterwards succeeded Lord Knollys as Governor of Bermuda, where he stayed until 1945. After the war, though his own athletic career had been cut short by injury, he maintained a close interest in the athletic world and was President of the AAA, President of the International Amateur Athletic Federation and a member of the International Olympic Committee. He was largely responsible, in conditions of considerable difficulty, for the successful organisation of the first post-war Olympic Games in London in 1948. Among other offices he held were those of President of the English Tourist Board and of the BTA, Rector of St Andrew's University from 1949 to 1952 and Mayor of Stamford in 1961. He succeeded his father as 6th Marquess in 1956. He was an old Olympic colleague of Lord Porritt, another medal winner, after the first world war and continued the association on athletic committees after the second world war. His work on health and fitness was recognised by the Honorary FRCS in 1964, when Lord Porritt (then Sir Arthur) was PRCS. He was very proud of his association with the College and he served as a Trustee of the Hunterian Museum from 1962 until his death. In later life he underwent three operations for arthroplasty of the hip and he found the shape of a hip prosthesis so pleasing that one was substituted for the more familiar 'Silver Lady' on the radiator cap of his Rolls-Royce. He died on 21 October, 1981, at the age of 76, survived by his wife Diana and four daughters.
Resource Identifier RCS: E006488
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Crowther, William Lodewyck (1817 - 1885)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2011-09-07 2022-09-12
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E001000-E001999/E001300-E001399
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/373532373532
Occupation General surgeon Politician
Details Educated at St Thomas's Hospital and at the Hotel-Dieu and La Charité, Paris. He settled in practice in Hobart Town, Tasmania, and was Surgeon to HM General Hospital from 1860-1869. Towards the close of his life he devoted himself to politics and was a well-known public man, being a member of the Legislative Council and of the Tasmanian Court of Medical Examiners, and twice a Minister without a portfolio. He was also Surgeon Major in the South Tasmanian Volunteer Artillery. About the year 1868 or 1869 he sent a valuable Tasmanian Collection to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and for this service received the signal honour of the Honorary (Gold) Medal (1869), of which the previous recipients had been very few - viz, James Parkinson in 1822, Joseph Swan (qv) in 1825, and George Bennett (qv) in 1834. Subsequent recipients have been men of the highest distinction, such as Owen, Erasmus Wilson, Paget, and Lister. The Library contains a "List of Specimens presented to the Museum...by W L Crowther...Hobart Town" in Sir William Flower's handwriting. The Hon Mr Crowther died of peritonitis at his residence in Hobart on April 12th, 1885, being then one of the oldest practitioners in the Colony. Publications: "On the Median Operation for Stone, with Section of the Urethra only, and Dilatation of the Prostate." - *Lancet*, 1867, ii, 126. "Urethrotomy or Lithotrity in Aged and Debilitated Subjects." - *Ibid.*, 1873, ii, 624. **See below for an expanded version of the original obituary which was printed in volume 1 of Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows. Please contact the library if you would like more information lives@rcseng.ac.uk** William Lodewyck Crowther was a surgeon, naturalist and politician who served as premier of Tasmania from 20 December 1878 to 29 October 1879. He is known to have collected and dissected the bodies of Aboriginal Tasmanians; in 1869 he was suspended from his post as an honorary medical officer at Hobart General Hospital after being charged with mutilating the body of William Lanne, then considered the ‘last’ male Aboriginal Tasmanian. Crowther was born on 15 April 1817 at Haarlem in the Netherlands, the son of William Crowther, a doctor, and Sarah Crowther née Pearson, the daughter of George Pearson, a former mayor of Macclesfield, Cheshire. The family emigrated to Hobart in what was then known as Van Diemen’s Land in 1825. Crowther became a boarder at Claiborne’s Academy, Longford in around 1828, and it was while he was at school that he developed an interest in natural history. In 1832 he was apprenticed to his father for five years and then became a partner as a surgeon apothecary and accoucheur. In February 1839 he sailed on the *Emu* to England, arriving in June. He sold a natural history collection of Tasmanian animals to the Earl of Derby and used the money to pay for his living costs and fees at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School and for another year of study in Paris. He gained his conjoint examination in 1841. On 12 November 1841 he married his cousin Sarah Victoria Marie Louise Muller, the daughter of Colonel A B Muller, equerry to the Duke of Kent. They had 11 children. In 1842 Crowther returned to Hobart and took over his father’s practice. His focus was on surgery, particularly of the bladder for stone and he rose rapidly in his profession. He wrote two papers for *The Lancet* (‘A few remarks on the safety of the median operation for the removal of stone from the bladder, the section being limited to the membranous urethra, with simple dilation of the prostate gland’ *Lancet* 1867 ii 126 and ‘Urethrotomy or lithotrity in aged and debilitated people’ *Lancet* 1873 ii 624). In 1860 he was appointed as an honorary medical officer at Hobert General Hospital. He continued collecting and was elected as a corresponding member of the Royal Zoological Society. Between April 1840 and 1868 he donated a large number of specimens to William Flower, the curator of the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The collection included the complete skeleton of a sperm whale, Tasmanian fish and a dolphin, together with ‘the bones of an Australian male’. In March 1869 he was awarded the gold medal of the College. In the same month he was suspended from his post at Hobart General Hospital after being charged with mutilating the body of William Lanne, a whaler, and reputedly the last ‘full-bloodied’ male Aboriginal Tasmanian. Lanne died in early March 1869 in Hobart from cholera and dysentery aged just 34. His body was taken to the morgue at the General Hospital and, as *The Times* reported on 29 May 1869, there followed an ‘unseemly struggle’ for his skeleton: ‘It is stated that on the night before the funeral a medical gentleman connected with the hospital abstracted the skull, intending to send it to the English College of Surgeons, and inside the scalp the skull of the corpse of a white man, also in the dead-house, was inserted in lieu of that which had been removed. When this mutilation was discovered the hands and feet were cut off to frustrate any attempt of the first mutilator to obtain the whole skeleton. The trunk was then buried, the coffin carried to the grave covered by a black opossum skin rug and followed by above a hundred citizens. In the following night, it is stated, the body was raised from the grave by order of the house surgeon of the hospital.’ An inquiry took place. Crowther was suspected as having carried out the first mutilation and was suspended from his post. A petition was sent to the Governor Charles Du Cane seeking an annulment of his suspension, but without success. The outcry over what had happened to Lanne directly led to the introduction of the 1869 Anatomy Act, regulating the practice of anatomy in the colony and protecting the dead from dissection without prior consent, the first legislation of its kind in Tasmania. Lanne’s skull was later donated to the anatomy department of the University of Edinburgh by Crowther’s son, Edward. It has since been returned to Tasmania. Crowther was a popular if controversial figure in Hobart and was active in politics. He was elected to the House of Assembly as the member for Hobart. He resigned, but from 1869 to 1885 held the Hobart seat on the Legislative Council. From 1876 to 1877 he was a minister without portfolio in the administration of Thomas Reibey. In December 1878 he was invited to form his own government as premier and served until October 1879, the first medical practitioner to hold that office in Tasmania. Apart from his surgical career, Crowther also had a number of successful business interests. In the 1850s he owned saw mills and exported timber to other Australian colonies and New Zealand and frame houses to California. He also owned whaling ships and shipped guano to Tasmania and the mainland. He later transferred his interests to the new Anglo-Australian Guano Company. Crowther became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1874. In 1889 a statue of Crowther was erected in Franklin Square in Hobart. After a campaign led by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, in August 2022 the City of Hobart Council voted to remove the monument. Sarah Gillam
Resource Identifier RCS: E001349
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Stirling, Sir Edward Charles (1848 - 1919)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-03-20
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E003000-E003999/E003700-E003799
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/375909375909
Occupation Ethnologist General surgeon Palaeontologist Politician
Details Born at Strathalbyn in South Australia in 1848, and was educated at St Peter's College, Adelaide. He was one of a group of young men who in the mid-sixties left South Australia for Cambridge, and matriculated from Trinity College. On his way to England he spent a year or more in Germany and France. While still at Cambridge he began the study of his profession, and after graduating BA with honours in the Natural Science Tripos in 1869 went to St George's Hospital, where he was appointed House Surgeon and worked his way up through the staff through the usual gradations, becoming in time Assistant Surgeon and Lecturer on Physiology as well as on Operative Surgery in the Medical School. He was Surgeon at the same time to the Belgrave Hospital for Children. In 1877 he took a trip to South Australia, married, and returned to London, intending to settle there as a consultant. Nostalgia however, and other reasons influenced him and his wife, and they returned to Adelaide in 1881. Here there was plenty of scope for a man of Stirling's energy and abilities. His experience as a lecturer on the subject pointed to him as the fit and proper person in the community to undertake the teaching of physiology in the newly founded University of Adelaide. His high qualifications also secured for him the position of Hon Medical Officer for the Adelaide Hospital. His scientific tastes predisposed him to the study of anthropology. For a hobby he amused himself with gardening. Not content with four such strings to his bow, he entered Parliament, and served as a Member for North Adelaide for three years, but was not re-elected. The young University lacked laboratories and apparatus, and Stirling was necessarily confined to teaching the elements of biology. It was his great merit, however, that he saw the possibility of establishing a curriculum for the MB degree. Through him, too, a wealthy colonist, Sir Thomas Elder, endowed a Chair of Chemistry, and the Medical School of the University started in 1885. After about two years Stirling chiefly arranged for the continuance of the MB course with the help of local talent. He was for thirty-four years the acknowledged doyen of the Medical School. His lectureship was converted into a professorship in 1900, and he was also in his active period a Member of the University Council, and Dean of the Faculties of Medicine and Science. Soon after Stirling's appointment to the Adelaide Hospital the staff became differentiated into Physicians, Surgeons and an Ophthalmologist. For several years Stirling acted as a Surgeon, and did most creditable work; he published reports of the first successful removal of a uterine fibroid by the abdominal route, making use of the serre-noeud (*Australas Med Gaz*, 1885, iv, 53), and of the first successful vaginal extirpation of the uterus for cancer (*Ibid*, 1886-7, vi, 89; *Med Jour Austral*, 1887, ix, 1). His reports now seem almost too minute in detail, but they are written in an excellent style, his Cambridge training coming strongly into evidence. He did indeed once endeavour to start as a Consulting Surgeon; fortunately he was independent of practise, for the patients did not come. Stirling shone as an ethnologist and palaeontologist, and the Adelaide Museum is a lasting memorial of his work as director of the institution. Its ethnological department is second to none in the Australian states. In palaeontology his name will always be associated with the *Diprotodon*, the mammoth wombat which was restored from bones found in 1892 in the dry Lake Callabonna (otherwise Lake Mulligan) (*Zool Soc Proc*, 1893, 473), and the *Genyornia Newtoni*, the rival of the Moa, found in the same districts (*S Austral Roy Soc Trans*, 1896, xx, 171; with A H C ZIETZ). His researches gained him a FRS in 1893. On such vexed questions as whether the platypus lays eggs, and as to the phenomena attending the parturition and lactation of the ordinary marsupials (*Zool Soc Proc*, 1889, 433), Stirling dissipated many long-cherished fairy-tales. Another biological triumph was his description of the *Notoryctes typhlops*, the blind marsupial mole (*S Austral Roy Soc Trans*, 1891, xiv, 154 etc). He was too, something of an explorer. His ride across Australia with Lord Kintore's party may not have been one of the highest importance to science, though it gained him the CMG in 1892; but a far more important piece of work was his association with the Horn Expedition of 1894, when he acted as Medical Officer and anthropologist. He was an active public man, was President of the first State Children's Council, was connected with societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and succeeded in carrying through Parliament the Act enfranchising the women of South Australia. He was conspicuous as a preserver of the fast-disappearing fauna of South Australia; took great pride in his garden at Mount Lofty, a show place; shot well and could ride camel or horse. When it is added that his delight was to do the work of 'Jerry Cruncher' in an aboriginal burying-ground or to pay a visit to a whale stranded about five hundred miles away from the city, some idea has to be given of his many activities, his boundless energy, and full life. When out duck-shooting on January 1st, 1919, with a temperature of 105 in the shade, he contracted an illness which led to his death by heart failure on March 20th, 1919. In 1877 he married Miss Jane Gilbert, daughter of the owner of a well-known station and vineyard, Pewsey Vale. At the time of his death he was Professor of Physiology at the University, Consulting Surgeon to the Adelaide Hospital, and Director of the Adelaide Museum. He was succeeded in the Professorship by his son-in-law, T Brailsford Robertson, who died January 18th, 1930. Publications:- "Observations on Certain Eruptions of the Skin, which occur after Recent Operations and Injuries," 8vo, London, 1880; reprinted from *St George's Hosp Rep*, 1879, x 519. "Address in Surgery," 8vo, Melbourne, 1889; reprinted from *Trans Intercolon Med Cong Australas*, Melbourne, 1889. "Hydatid Disease" (with JOSEPH COOKE VERCO) in Allbutt's *System of Medicine*, 1907, ii. *Anthropology of the Horn Exploring Expedition to Central Australia*.
Resource Identifier RCS: E003726
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Fremantle, Sir Francis Edward (1872 - 1943)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-06-19
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E004000-E004999/E004100-E004199
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/376294376294
Occupation General surgeon Politician Public health officer
Details Born in London on 29 May 1872, fourth son of the Very Rev the Hon William Henry Fremantle, Dean of Ripon, and Isabella, his wife, daughter of Sir Culling Eardley, 3rd Baronet, the religious philanthropist (for whom see *DNB*). The Dean was the second son of Thomas Francis Fremantle, 1st Lord Cottesloe (see *DNB*), who had been Secretary of War in 1844, and grandson of Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Francis Fremantle, GCB (see *DNB*), who commanded HMS *Neptune* at Trafalgar. Francis Fremantle was educated in College at Eton (King's Scholar 1886 election) and at Balliol College, Oxford, 1891-94, where he distinguished himself as an athlete and took second-class honours in physiology. He entered Guy's Hospital Medical School in 1895, qualified in 1897, and served as house physician under George Newton Pitt, MD, FRCP. In 1942 he was elected a Governor of the Hospital. During the Boer war he volunteered for active service in South Africa as a civil surgeon with the field force. He sent home to *Guy's Hospital Gazette*, which he had edited, trenchant letters on the medical administration of the army. On his return to England he published *Impressions of a doctor in khaki*, 1901, and was appointed assistant secretary to the Departmental Committee on the reorganization of the Army Medical Service. In 1902 he became Medical Officer of Health for Hertfordshire, where he had landed interests and subsequently inherited his mother's property of Bedwell Park, Hatfield; and in 1908 he became also Chief School Medical Officer for the county. In 1903, however, after taking the FRCS and the MCh, he went to India as Plague Medical Officer in the Punjab, and in 1904 was special correspondent of *The Lancet* at the Russo-Japanese war. He held a commission dated 1902 as surgeon-captain in the Herts Yeomanry and took a prominent part in the public life of the county. In 1906 he was adopted as prospective unionist candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Rotherhithe, but at the general election of 1910 was disqualified, as a public servant; this disability was later removed from Medical Officers of Health. He resigned the post of Medical Officer of Health in 1916 and was appointed Consulting Medical Officer of Health for Hertfordshire. In 1919 he was elected Conservative MP for St Albans, and was re-elected at subsequent general elections, for the last time in 1935 with a two to one majority of 17,510 votes. Meanwhile he again saw active service in the first world war, as DADMS (Sanitary) in Gallipoli, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and was mentioned in despatches; he was created OBE in the birthday honours ("peace list") in 1919. He was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Hertfordshire in 1926, and was created a Knight Bachelor in 1932. He was a Justice of the Peace and held the Territorial Decoration. Fremantle took a full share of public and professional duties, inside and outside Parliament. He was elected FRCP in 1910 and served on the Council 1930-32. In 1920 he was president of the Incorporated Society of Medical Officers of Health, and in 1928 of the section of epidemiology and state medicine at the Royal Society of Medicine, and he was a vice-president of the Royal Sanitary Institute 1933-43. He was also a strong supporter of the Institute of District Nurses. He delivered the Jenner Lecture at Guy's Hospital, and examined for some years in public health for the final Oxford MB. He also took an active part in the work of the British Empire Cancer Campaign, the National Institute for the Deaf, the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association, the British Social Hygiene Council, and the Central Association for Mental Welfare. He served on the Central Medical War Committee and as chairman of its aliens' sub-committee did much for the benefit of refugee medical men during the Hitlerite terror in Europe. He was a promoter of the London School of Hygiene, and a member of its first Court of Governors. In the British Medical Association he was vice-president of the section of public health at the Glasgow meeting in 1922, and vice-president of the section of medical sociology at the Belfast meeting in 1937. He served on various special committees, on the Parliamentary sub-committee, and on the Central Emergency Committee at the time of the second world war; gave evidence on behalf of the Association before the Royal Commission on the Insurance Acts in 1924-25, and in 1938 was one of four medical MPs specially invited to address the annual Representative Meeting. From 1919 to 1921 he was a member of the London County Council and served as chairman of its housing committee. He was also chairman of the council of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, and a director of Welwyn Garden City. Though personally a Conservative and elected on the party platform, he took an independent and idealistic view of the "doctor's mandate in Parliament" as he called it in his Chadwick lecture of 1936; and held himself to represent the special experience of the medical profession in its knowledge of the nation's health and way of life, with the widest reference to general policy and administration. He liked to think of himself as in the direct tradition of John Somerset, MD, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer and personal adviser to King Henry VI, the founder of Eton, forgetting perhaps that Somerset's advice was chiefly astrological. Fremantle spoke and wrote much on public health questions. In 1927 he published two books, constructively critical of current public health policy: *The Housing of the Nation* and *The Health of the Nation*, both with prefaces by Neville Chamberlain, then Minister of Health. He had previously published *A Traveller's study of Health and Empire*, but he was best known by his speeches and his frequent letters to *The Times*. For eighteen years (1925-43) he was chairman of the Unionist Health and Housing Committee, later called the Conservative Social Services Committee, of the House of Commons, and from 1923 he had been chairman of the Parliamentary Medical Committee, whose business lay very near his heart. He was a most assiduous and industrious Member, and one of the few for whom a special table was reserved in the library of the House of Commons. He was a member of Lord Trevethin's Committee on Venereal Diseases in 1923, served on the Industrial Health Research Board 1930-34, on the Departmental Committees on the Rent Restriction Acts in 1923, 1931, and 1937, and on that on the Midwives Act of 1908. He was a member of the Central Housing Committee of the Ministry of Health and of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Nursing Service. He also served on the Select Committee on Publications and House of Commons Debate Reports. He endeared himself to the House by occasional "spoonerisms", as when in a debate on birth control he mentioned "the sale of conservatives". In one of his last speeches, on 16 July 1943, he spoke earnestly of the causes and effects of a declining birth-rate. Fremantle was an active Churchman, a member of the St Albans diocesan conference and of the Church Assembly. He addressed the Modern Churchman's Conference at Oxford in the summer of 1943 not long before his death, on "The layman's rights and duties". Fremantle married in 1905 Dorothy Marion Travers, only daughter of Henry Joseph Chinnery, of Frigford Manor, Bicester. Lady Fremantle survived him with one son, Lieutenant-Colonel David Fremantle. He died suddenly at Bedwell Park, Hatfield, on 26 August 1943, aged 71, and was buried at Essendon, Hertfordshire. A memorial service was held in St Albans Abbey. His principal writings are mentioned above.
Resource Identifier RCS: E004111
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Huggins, Rt Hon Godfrey Martin, Viscount Malvern (1883 - 1971)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2014-08-11
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E005000-E005999/E005800-E005899
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/377984377984
Occupation General practitioner General surgeon Politician
Details Born on 6 July 1883, he was the eldest son of Godfrey Huggins, member of the London Stock Exchange, of Berkhamsted, and Emily Blest, his wife. After preparatory school Huggins went to Malvern College in January 1898, but had to leave in July 1899 because his schooling was cut short by illness as he developed acute otitis media complicated by mastoiditis. In 1901 he entered the medical school of St Thomas's where as a student he was a contemporary and friend of Max Page, Rowley Bristow and Sidney Macdonald. He qualified in 1906 with the Conjoint Diploma and then obtained successive house appointments at St Thomas's as casualty officer, house surgeon and senior house surgeon. After this he went to Great Ormond Street, first as house physician and later as resident medical superintendent, during which period he was admitted a Fellow in 1908. In 1911 after a serious illness he was advised to convalesce in a sunny climate and therefore chose to go out to Salisbury, Rhodesia, as locum for a general practitioner for six months. He decided to remain and set up as a general practitioner surgeon in Salisbury. When war broke out in 1914, he returned to England and was gazetted as a Captain RAMC and surgical specialist, serving in England, Malta and France. In 1915 as a result of his own war experience, he wrote a small handbook on the management and care of patients who had undergone amputation. Returning to Salisbury he decided in 1921 to give up general practice and became a consultant as he was recognised as one of the most able surgeons in Southern Africa. Even after his entry later into politics and when he ultimately became Prime Minister he found it impossible to abandon surgery completely owing to the demands of his old patients and of his friends. He would often operate in the early morning before going on to his ministerial duties and it was only in 1950 that he gave up surgery altogether. In 1921 he volunteered for service during a police strike, when he mediated successfully for the strikers and, as a result, was urged to stand for parliament. In 1923 he was elected to represent Salisbury North in the legislative assembly. Like many other Rhodesians he had favoured the linking of Southern Rhodesia with South Africa, but, after a referendum in 1922, he accepted the decision of the majority and joined the Rhodesian party to help implement self government. In 1928 he was returned with an increased majority, but he was becoming increasingly impatient with the policy of his party. When the world depression hit Rhodesia in 1930, the Government was forced to adopt stringent economies, and it was over the decision to reduce the salaries of civil servants that Huggins broke with the Government. One vote was needed to give the Government the necessary two thirds majority, which Huggins gave with reluctance, announcing that he would leave the party. In 1933 he was persuaded to accept the leadership of the Reform party in opposition. After a year, however, the majority of this party decided to join with elements of the Rhodesia party forming a new party under Huggins leadership. A general election followed in 1934 in the month of November and the new united party was returned with 24 seats. The next general election was held in April 1939 in view of the threat of war, instead of waiting the full five years, and Huggins' United Party was again returned with a majority of 23 seats. This Government carried on throughout the war period for seven years, but in the first post war election of 1946 was nearly defeated and in 1948 was defeated on a minor issue. By this time the question of closer union with Northern Rhodesia had become a dominant political issue and the United Party, led by Huggins, won a resounding victory, his party being in power during the negotiations for the formation of the Federation with Nyasaland. Huggins became Prime Minister of the Federation in November 1953. He had been the architect of the Federation but he resigned office on November 1 1956, the day the British and French Governments launched their Suez adventure. He was succeeded by Sir Roy Welensky who, like himself, considered that the British Government had let the Federation down. Huggins years as Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia were marked by the country's progress up to the outbreak of war in 1939, by its great record during the war and by its tremendous progress afterwards. He occupied the position of Prime Minister longer than any other man in the history of the Commonwealth, although he did not enter politics until after middle life. For many years he held the portfolio of native education, housing and hospitals, all of which made great advances, as did research in tropical diseases. Sympathetic in outlook towards the African and believing in social and economic advance rather than political advance, he was at the same time a realist, and as a result was assailed vigorously from time to time, both by those who thought that advancement of the African was not rapid enough, and by those who thought that it was too fast. Huggins caused comment in public life by his occasional apparent impishness, puckishness and a tendency, unusual in a politician, of saying exactly what he thought, irrespective of the time or the place, thereby exasperating his political opponents and giving anxious moments to his friends. His greatest disappointment was the defeat in 1962 as a result of the Southern Rhodesia election of Sir Edgar Whitehead and the United Party with the resulting emergence of the Rhodesian Front. The indications were that the Rhodesian electorate, after more than a generation, had turned away from the policy of racial progress initiated by him, Huggins. He expressed the opinion that it was a victory for those white Rhodesians who were opposed to any change. As the Rhodesia Front policies became increasingly intolerant, he expressed anxiety concerning the country's future. Pro-British and a loyalist, he condemned UDI, the declaration of a republic and the abolition of the Union Jack. Doubtless, being fully occupied as a surgeon for half his life, and partially even after he had entered politics, made him a realist. In 1938 he operated on his Governor, Sir Herbert Stanley and in 1939 on the Governor of Nyasaland; while on another occasion he dealt with a visiting British surgeon who had been mauled by a leopard. He was created a Viscount in 1955 and retired from office in 1956. Ever since his school days he had suffered from deafness, but he was a man of great energy, showing little strain, even when following two careers simultaneously. His relaxations were polo, golf, tennis and racing in his capacity as a steward of the Mashonaland Turf Club. In 1921 he married Blanche Slatter, by whom he had two sons. He died on 8 May 1971 aged 87.
Resource Identifier RCS: E005801
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Addison, Sir Christopher, Viscount Addison of Stallingborough (1869 - 1951)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-03-20
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E003000-E003999/E003700-E003799
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/375896375896
Occupation Anatomist Politician
Details Born 19 June 1869 at Hogsthorpe, Lincolnshire, son of Robert Addison, a farmer, and Susan Fanthorpe his wife. He was educated at Trinity College, Harrogate, and St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he was later demonstrator and lecturer in anatomy. He qualified in 1891 and took the Fellowship in 1895. He was professor of anatomy at University College, Sheffield, 1895-1901, and edited the *Quarterly Medical Journal for Yorkshire and adjoining counties*. He came back to London in 1901 on his appointment as lecturer in anatomy at Charing Cross Hospital and served also as dean of the medical school. He edited G V Ellis's *Demonstrations of Anatomy*, 12th edition, in 1905. In 1907 he went back to his old hospital, St Bartholomew's, as lecturer in anatomy, and held the post till 1913 although he had entered active political life in 1910. He was an examiner in anatomy for the Fellowship from 1903 to 1908, with (Sir) Arthur Keith, FRCS as his colleague. It was about the turn of the century that the medical schools of London began to provide specialized teaching in anatomy, in place of the instruction formerly given by the hospital surgeons. Addison was among the able men first chosen for these whole-time posts; Keith in the same period was making his mark at the London Hospital. Each had taken the Fellowship, not with the intention of practising surgery, but as an indication of proficiency to teach surgical students. Addison's main contribution to anatomy is recorded in an exhaustive paper, running through three volumes of the *Journal of Anatomy*, 1899-1901, "On the topographical anatomy of the abdominal viscera in man". The substance of this research was given as Hunterian lectures at the College in 1901, and Addison made further contributions to the subject in subsequent years (see the bibliography below). Keith has pointed out, in an authoritative survey of Addison's anatomical work in the *British Journal of Surgery*, 1952, that this three-dimensional mapping of the abdomen was based on some 10,000 measurements made on forty bodies, and that it provided for the first time a precise guide to the range of size and position of the contents of the abdomen. Addison himself pointed out that this had its immediate clinical value for the surgeon, at that time when operative intervention in the abdomen was being rapidly developed. The work is remembered today through "Addison's transpyloric plane", the imagined plane of section to which he related his measurements. Addison had entered St Bartholomew's Hospital as a student in 1886 and was taught anatomy by C B Lockwood, FRCS with James Berry, FRCS as demonstrator. The other teachers of anatomy at Bart's during his student years (1886-89) were John Langton, F Howard Marsh, W Bruce Clarke, W H H Jessop, E W Roughton, Edgar W Willett, all Fellows of the College, and W P Herringham, FRCP. Lockwood had recently founded the Anatomical Society, which Addison joined in 1895; be became its honorary secretary in 1904-06, and was elected an honorary member in 1926. Addison had long been interested in the political aspect of social and economic questions, and entered active political life at the time of the Liberal party's triumph. He was elected MP for the Hoxton division of Shoreditch in 1910, and his able support of Lloyd George, when the national insurance scheme was being passed through Parliament in 1911, marked him for office. He was parliamentary secretary to the Board of Education when war broke out in 1914. Lloyd George, on becoming Minister of Munitions, brought Addison to his side as under-secretary. His skilful administration, especially in matters of costing, won high praise, and when Lloyd George became Premier he succeeded to the Ministry of Munitions (1917) and was made a Privy Councillor. Later, as Minister for Reconstruction and as the first Minister of Health from 1918 to 1921, he promoted an ambitious programme of state-assisted housing. Addison by now was more radical than his leader and when he failed to win Lloyd George's support for his scheme, he resigned from the government, and soon made known his whole-hearted conversion to the Labour party. At the general election of 1929 he was elected Labour member for Swindon, and in Ramsay MacDonald's government he became Minister of Agriculture (1930-31) and sponsored the first Agricultural Marketing Acts. Agriculture was, next to medicine, his chief personal interest. He was the son of a farmer, and in later life successfully farmed his own land in Buckinghamshire. He lost his seat at the general election of 1931, and was an outspoken critic of the "National" coalition government. He was re-elected for Swindon in 1934, but lost the seat at the next general election in 1935. At the coronation of King George VI (1937) he was raised to the peerage as Baron Addison of Stallingborough, County Lincoln, and he became Dominions Secretary when the Labour party came again to office in 1945. He made his greatest mark however as leader of the House of Lords, when he had to press the government's nationalization schemes in face of a very strong opposition, and did so with urbane ability. He was advanced to the rank of a Viscount in 1945, and was awarded on 3 December 1946 the rare distinction of a Knighthood of the Garter. As leader of his party in the House of Lords he won "the respect and abiding affection of all with whom he had to do, whatever their political views". Formal tributes were paid to his memory in the House on 30 January 1952, and a memorial service was held the same day in Westminster Abbey. Addison was of solid build and middle height. His thick hair was raven- black in youth and snow-white in age. His colleagues celebrated his seventy-seventh birthday in 1946 by a complimentary luncheon at the House of Lords, and his eightieth birthday was also marked (*British Medical Journal*, 1946, 1, 993 and 1949, 1, 1132). Addison married twice: (1) in 1902 Isobel, daughter of Archibald Gray; Mrs Addison died on 22 August 1934, at Peterley Farm, Great Missenden, leaving two sons and two daughters; (2) in 1937 Dorothy, daughter of J P Low, who survived him. He died at Radnage, near High Wycombe, on 11 December 1951, aged 82, and was succeeded in the peerage by his elder son. There was a private funeral at Radnage Church, and a memorial service in Westminster Abbey. Publications: On the topographical anatomy of the abdominal viscera in man, especially the gastro-intestinal canal (Hunterian lectures, Royal College of Surgeons). *Journal of Anatomy*, 1899, 33, 565; 1900, 34, 427; 1901, 35, 166 and 277. Also *Lancet*, 1901, 1, 759, 911, and 1059; and, as a book: Edinburgh, Neill and Co. 1901, 116 pp. Discussion on same subject. *Journal of Anatomy*, 1904, 38, Proceedings pages xxx-xlv. A discussion on the topographical anatomy of the thoracic and abdominal viscera from a systematic and clinical standpoint (British Medical Association, annual scientific meeting, Cheltenham, 1901). *Brit med J.* 1901, 2, 1065. Cervical ribs. *Journal of Anatomy*, 1902, 36, Proceedings pages lxxiv-lxxvi. *Demonstrations of anatomy* by G V Ellis, 12th edition by C Addison. London, 1905. On the future of the medical services (speech at dinner of Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, 2 October 1937). *Brit med J*. 1937, 2, 766. *The betrayal of the slums*. London: Jenkins, 1922. *Politics from within, 1911-18*. Preface by Lord Carson. Jenkins, 1924. 2 vols. *Practical socialism*. Labour Publishing Co. 1926. 2 vols. *The nation and its food*. Benn, 1929. *Religion and politics*. Epworth Press, 1931. *Problems of a socialist government*. Preface by Stafford Cripps. Gollancz, 1933. *Four and a half years* (a personal diary from June 1914 to January 1919). Hutchinson, 1934. 2 vols.
Resource Identifier RCS: E003713
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Horsley, Sir Victor Alexander Haden (1857 - 1916)

2024-05-07T10:39:56Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2012-04-25
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E002000-E002999/E002200-E002299
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/374450374450
Occupation Neurosurgeon Pathologist Politician
Details Born at 128 Church Street, Kensington, on April 14th, 1857. His grandfather was William Horsley, musician; his father, John Callcott Horsley (1817-1903), RA, and Treasurer 1882-1897, author of *Recollections of a RA*, an opponent of the Pre-Raphaelites, of the Paris Salon, and of the nude model of his day, a persona grata to Queen Victoria - hence the name Victor. His mother was Rosamund, sister of Sir Francis Seymour Haden (qv), etcher and surgeon, second wife of Victor's father, Victor being the third child. The sister of his father, Miss Sophy Horsley, was a distinguished pianist and a friend of Mendelssohn, who dedicated to her some of his pieces. One of the grandfather's daughters married Isambard Brunel, the engineer, who by inhaling a half-sovereign became a remarkable surgical case. Horsley inherited from his father a fine figure and face, had a rather dolichocephalic head, and the hands of an artist, musician, and surgeon. He was brought up largely at his father's country house, Willesby, near Cranbrook, Kent, where he had the opportunities afforded by country life which early drew him towards natural history. He began to learn French from his governess, and then from 1866-1873 attended as a day-boy the Elizabethan school at Cranbrook. But Cranbrook made no impression on him, nor he on Cranbrook. "He ought to have gone to some great public school far from home" (*see* Paget's biography, p14). But Horsley's peculiar intellect would have rebelled against being drilled into uniformity, and he went on to University College, into the atmosphere which distinguished the University of London from Oxford and Cambridge. He learnt enough of the classics at Cranbrook to excite the strong love of archaeology he exhibited throughout life. His genius as a reformer was early exhibited in his sketch of a reformed dress for women which his sister pronounced hideous. He saw something of the local medical practice of Dr T Joyce. He matriculated in 1874 after being coached by Mr (later Sir) Philip Magnus, later MP for the University. He attended University College for the Preliminary Scientific MB course, the Professor of Physics being Sir Carey Foster, who had (Sir) Oliver Lodge acting as a Student Assistant for the Junior Physics Course. From 1875-1878 he worked at anatomy and physiology under Viner Ellis, Dancer Thane, Burdon-Sanderson, and Schafer. Burdon-Sanderson combined experimental physiology and experimental pathology in their bearings on medicine and surgery. He thus became the model which directed Horsley's future. Horsley started hospital work in October, 1878; he acted as Physician's Clerk to Charlton Bastian, who influenced him in opposite directions; he was attracted over aphasia and the sensorimotor functions of the cortex; repelled by spontaneous generation based on imperfect bacteriological methods. His first publication was with Bastian on the combination of arrested development in the right ascending parietal convolution and in the left upper limb. With F W Mott in 1882 he proved the absence of micro-organisms in healthy tissues. He was taught surgery by Marcus Beck (qv), the greatest teacher of students of his day, combining the pathology based on Pasteur with the practice of Lister. The strict adherence to Lister's methods, together with general anaesthesia and some addition of morphia, underlay the whole of Horsley's surgery and of his experiments on animals as well, although through von Bergmann (qv) and Arthur Barker (qv) in later years he made some use of sterilizing methods and of topical anaesthetics. He was Resident House Surgeon for six months under John Marshall, who in 1883 gave the Bradshaw Lecture at the College of Surgeons, "On the Operation of Nerve Stretching", at the production of which Horsley assisted, and clinched Marshall's argument by demonstrating *nervi nervorum*. Horsley's delicate nervous mechanism rejected poisons even in infinitesimal doses; he made fifty hazardous self-administrations of anaesthesia, noting the stages of disappearance and vagaries of consciousness, and of the patellar tendon reflex. He made a slashing attack on tobacco in the Students' Club when clay pipes and coarse quids were thought to be causing cancer in the mouth; cigarette-smoking had just come in and was causing amblyopia. He did not live to see women take to mild cigarettes, but found plenty of evidence that nicotine is a cardiac poison. During the six months as Assistant he was able to prepare for the MB BS and to gain the Gold Medal in Surgery in the summer of 1881. In the autumn of 1881 he went to Berlin with introductions from his aunt, Miss Sophy Horsley, as well as to Leipzig. He thus learnt German and formed his German connection. He was inspired by Cohnheim as regards his future lectures on pathology; had a long controversy with Munk over the prefrontal convolutions, and translated Koch's *Investigation of Pathogenic Micro-organisms* for the New Sydenham Society in 1886. From 1882-1884 he was Surgical Registrar, and Assistant Professor of Pathology, 1884-1887; during this period he did most of his elementary clinical teaching to residents, students, and nurses at University College Hospital. EXPERIMENTAL PATHOLOGY - Burdon-Sanderson had been the first Superintendent of the Brown Institute, and especially through him Horsley was appointed, in succession to Roy, Superintendent for the six years 1884-1890. He was thus put into the peculiar position of head of the laboratory of a hospital for the treatment of diseased animals. In the laboratory there were already workers engaged independently in experimental pathology, both human and animal, whilst a first-class veterinary surgeon treated domestic animals, both as in-patients and out-patients, in accordance with progress already made in medicine, by the use of antiseptics and anaesthetics. It brought Horsley into the public arena over questions of health, and at the same time exposed him to malignant attacks concerning animal experiments. Experiments on animals had been properly regulated by Act of Parliament, and Horsley conformed, and saw to it that co-workers did the same, in respect to the licences and supervision under the Act. No sufficient comprehension of Horsley's achievements at the Brown Institution can be formed except after a thorough study of his Annual Reports, preserved in the University of London. In those Reports are placed on record researches made by a number of independent workers and the important results at which they arrived. One example may be given, "The Chemistry of the Blood, and other Scientific Papers by the late L C Wooldridge", edited by Horsley and Starling. Wooldridge, Assistant Physician to Guy's Hospital, died in the midst of his work, bitterly lamented by Horsley, who attributed his death to cigarette-smoking in excess. In 1879 Claude Bernard said that there was nothing known of the thyroid and suprarenal glands; Kocher and Reverdin drew attention to the cachexia strumipriva which followed upon total excision of the thyroid gland for goitre. Schiff confirmed this experimentally on dogs and rodents. Myxoedema had been described clinically by physicians in London, but it was connected with an antiquated pathology until Felix Semon drew the attention of the Clinical Society to the Swiss observations. A committee of investigation was formed, and Horsley was asked to study the matter experimentally in monkeys. His results were most striking; they opened the way to a conservative surgery, and further, after grafting had been tried, to the administration of thyroid gland preparations begun by George Murray, of Newcastle, student and then House Physician at University College Hospital from 1886-1889. Less generally recognized were Horsley's concurrent experiments on the pituitary body, some twenty in number, in dogs; he used a small trephine with a long shank for the approach through the palate. The temporal route which he adopted for human patients, he returned to in 1911 with Handelsmann, making fifty-four further experiments. Rabies was being repeatedly revived in this country by dogs imported from the Continent. Besides cats, deer in Richmond Park were affected, a mare bitten on the muzzle battered to pieces her stall at the Brown Institute, and was covered with blood before she could be got at and killed. A boy bitten behind the knee, after a latent period of two years and four months from the date of the bite, proved at the time to have been caused by a dog affected by rabies, started symptoms in the persisting scar, and there followed death from hydrophobia, completely confirmed by post-mortem examination. Horsley went over to Pasteur, taking with him the laboratory attendant who was accidentally infected with and died in Paris from the variety of hydrophobia known in the dog as 'dumb rabies'. Horsley became the authority through whom Walter Long (later Lord Long of Wraxall), to his eternal credit, was enabled to withstand the opposition which included his own fox-hunting friends. He introduced the universal muzzling order, and the quarantine at the ports, which stamped out both rabies and hydrophobia. Incidentally the order caused a marked diminution in canine distemper and chorea, and Horsley declared in his Report of 1889 that it was an absurd and cruel fallacy that a dog must have distemper. Horsley co-operated with others in his researches on the brain and spinal cord. He began the minute localization of the cortical function of the brain with Schafer, confirming Ferrier's results on monkeys; then with Beevor, who at the same time made an extraordinary collection of the cerebral tumours observed at the National Hospital. The observations were extended to an orang-utan in 1890, and subsequently by Sherrington and Grunbaum to the chimpanzee and gorilla - all serving as a guide to Horsley in his operations on the brain. F W Mott and Howard Tooth with Horsley experimented upon the spinal cord, its posterior columns and posterior roots; with Schafer, Risien Russell, and R H Clarke, Horsley experimented on the cerebellum. At Oxford, with Burdon-Sanderson and Francis Gotch, his brother-in-law, using a special apparatus, there was electrically demonstrated a current in the spinal cord descending when the cerebral cortex was excited. The current was demonstrated in the spinal cord below the upper limb segment, and above the lower limb segment, when the cortical area for the leg was stimulated. The muscular contractions in the lower limb were first persistent, then rhythmic, corresponding to clinical tonic and clonic convulsions - a demonstration included in the Croonian Lecture in 1891 with Gotch, by which Horsley reached the apogee of his genius. With Felix Semon and Risien Russell were carried through experiments connecting the cortex cerebri with the larynx, and with R H Clarke studies directed to relieve roaring in horses. With W G Spencer were made experiments on intracranial tension, on the connection of the cortex of the brain with the respiratory rhythm, and with the circulation through the carotids. This led to an elaborate research with R H Clarke, and with Kramer, of Cincinnati, on gunshot wounds of the head, and the explosive effect of the modern rifle bullet, due to its velocity. At the outbreak of the War Horsley was the one surgeon in the country who might possibly have saved some among early cases of head injuries before other surgeons had gained experience. Thirty years later there appeared disturbances of the respiratory rhythm caused by scattered lesions of the cerebrum in the course of *encephalitis lethargica*. There was one subject to which Horsley devoted an enormous amount of work in early days without success - general epilepsy - subsequent to experiments by Brown-Séquard, Franc, and Pitres. Horsley was optimistic, hoping for discovery developing out of Hughlings Jackson's focal epilepsy; he studied convulsions produced by poisons and by infective agents, by intracranial pressure, by disturbances of the cerebral circulation, by gunshot injury. Kocher was at that time equally hopeful, believing in a cortical congestion rather than in a cortical anaemia as the immediate forerunner of the fit. After 1890 all the above work was continued at University College. In 1887, from Assistant Professor, Horsley became Professor of Pathology, compiled a syllabus of lectures, following Claude Bernard and Cohnheim, to be accompanied as far as possible by practical demonstrations. He had a most brilliant assistant in Rubert Boyce, who later established the School of Tropical Medicine at Liverpool. Vaughan Harley started the teaching of pathological chemistry in the face of much opposition. Horsley held the post until 1896. He made some general statements at the Nottingham Meeting of the British Medical Association as President of the Pathological Section. He was also a leader in the Pathological Club in bringing to a standstill the London Pathological Society because of its limitation of attention to pathological anatomy. The Section of the Royal Society of Medicine was the successor. MARRIAGE AND FAMILY - The families had long been friends when in October, 1883, Horsley became engaged to Miss Eldred Bramwell, daughter of the engineer Sir Frederick Bramwell, and niece of the judge, George, Baron Bramwell, and they were married in October, 1887. She became in the fullest sense his helpmate. There were three children - two sons and a daughter. Shortly afterwards his sister Rosamund married Francis Gotch, his partner in the most important of his experiments, and later Professor of Physiology at Oxford. His wife supported him in directing his future to include surgery. For a few years they lived in Park Street, Grosvenor Square; from 1891 at 25 Cavendish Square. During the War the eldest son became a Captain in the Gordon Highlanders and was wounded three times. Joining the Royal Flying Corps, he was promoted Flight Commander and was killed while flying on Aug 19th, 1918. His second son was wounded in 1914 whilst in charge of bombers; his injuries during the War precipitated his death subsequently. His daughter accompanied her father and mother to Egypt, where she was severely attacked by dysentery. She later married Stanley Robinson. SURGERY - In 1885 Horsley was appointed Assistant Surgeon to University College Hospital, and in 1886 Surgeon to the National Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy, Queen Square. At University College from 1893 he was styled Surgeon to Out-patients without allotted beds. It was only in 1900 that he came into charge of in-patients as Professor of Clinical Surgery. On the one hand his attention had been drawn to novel and special departments of surgery, and he was temperamentally and by circumstances a teacher not of students but rather of post-graduates. His practice of surgery was dictated by the patients of the National Hospital, which included thyroid gland cases. He began operations there, as Spencer Wells had started ovariotomy at the Samaritan Hospital, without an operating theatre, but it was rendered possible by Listerism. Before him, the surgical treatment had been mainly limited to the subcutaneous tenotomy initiated by Stromeyer and Dieffenbach. (*See* ADAMS, WILLIAM.) In 1884 Alexander Hughes Bennett (son of J Hughes Bennett, the Professor of Medicine in Edinburgh), Physician to the Hospital for Paralysis and Epilepsy, Regent's Park, and Assistant Physician at Westminster Hospital, had, in the light of Hughlings Jackson's clinical observations and the experiments of Ferrier, diagnosed a case of localized lesion in the ascending parietal convolutions giving rise to focal epilepsy. At the Regent's Park Hospital Godlee, later Sir Rickman Godlee (qv), trephined at the spot upon which Bennett put his finger, and scooped out a subcortical tumour the size of a pigeon's egg. The actual cautery was applied to the interior of the cavity to arrest haemorrhage, and to this is attributable the hernia cerebri with inflammation which caused the death of the patient on the twenty-third day. Horsley in the discussion mentioned the preliminary use of morphia. His first operation at the National Hospital was for Jacksonian epilepsy on May 15th, 1886; on May 28th at the Clinical Society he mentioned the ligature of the jugular vein for lateral sinus thrombosis, later developed by Arbuthnot Lane and Charles Ballance. The short paper he read at the Brighton Meeting of the British Medical Association in July concerned three cases of Jacksonian epilepsy set up by a scar, a tuberculoma in the thumb area, and a splinter surrounded by a cyst. He made a semilunar flap, replacing the crucial incision handed down from Hippocrates, liable to be followed by a hernia cerebri. More famous still was the case, with Gowers, of spinal-cord tumour. Horsley had prepared himself by experiments on animals and cadavers. Assisted by Charles Ballance, after exposure of the cord, it was necessary to extend the wound upwards two vertebrae. The patient was exhibited at the Medico-Chirurgical Society (*Med-Chir Trans*,1888, lxxi, 377 (paper); discussion in *Proc Med-Chir Soc*, NS ii, 407). In no operation did Horsley exhibit such marvellous skill as in exposing the spinal cord. To him is due the discovery and relief of varieties of circumscribed pachymeningitis and cystic meningitis. Twenty-one cases were described at Queen Square on Feb 27th, 1909. All the laminectomies done during the War originated with Horsley; there were a few successes, although the injury rendered the majority of cases hopeless. For trigeminal neuralgia there was the avulsion of the third or second branches. Horsley's experiments, in which posterior roots were divided, led him to undertake the division of the main root of the fifth nerve, at first behind a screen in a ward. He prepared himself by animal experiments and dissection of the dead body. The operation had to be interrupted owing to haemorrhage from a petrosal sinus. He tried the zygomatic approach used by Rose, then adopted the temporal Hartley-Krause route. He later reserved the division of the main root, which he did better than anyone else, for recurring cases. In 1905 he reported a series of cases with a mortality of 7 per cent among 149 removals of the Gasserian ganglion: all the deaths were in patients over 50 years of age. In his Linacre Lecture in 1909, after twenty-three years' experience, he ascribed the following functions to the gyrus precentralis of man: (1) slight tactility, (2) topognosis, (3) muscular sense, (4) arthritic sense, (5) stereognosis, (6) pain, (7) movement. At the International Medical Congress in London, 1913, he presided over the surgical division. Howard Tooth had analysed 500 cases of cerebral tumour at Queen Square between 1902 and 1911, in connection largely with which Horsley analysed 265 operations. Speaking generally, decompression was preferable to removal; an alternative to removal was not then under consideration, for radiology was still in embryo. POLITICS - Three opinions extracted from obituary notices: "What demon drove a man of this type into the muddy pool of politics? A born reformer, once in a contest, no manna-dropping words come from his tongue, A hard hitter, and always with a fanatical conviction of the justice of his cause. What wonder that the world's coarse thumb and finger could not always plumb the sincerity of his motives? Let us, as dear old Fuller says of Caius, 'leave the heat of his faith to God's sole judgement and the light of his good works to men's imitation'." (OSLER, *Brit Med Jour*.) "Had he lived, he would have seen many of the reforms he was pressing already adopted, and this only shows how inestimable a benefit to others it is that some men should think differently, and act differently, to accepted customs and traditions." (F W MOTT, *Proc Roy Soc*.) "The day will assuredly come when the crowded and eventful life of Sir Victor Horsley will form one of the brightest and most moving pages in the whole history of British Medicine." (ARTHUR KEITH, *Times Lit Supp*.) At the Church Congress in October, 1892, at Folkestone the subject under discussion was, "Do the interests of mankind require experiments on living animals?" Miss Frances Power Cobbe had published, under her own name, a book entitled *The Nine Circles*. This, after exposure, was excused as having been compiled not by her, but for her. Horsley, then as afterwards in many other instances, demonstrated a *suppressio veri* which silenced antagonists. But there continued a repetition of statements proved over and again to be untrue against him and his work. It embittered his manner on the platform, for the natural Horsley was the ideal captain of a team, helpful, encouraging, abounding in praise of those working under him, perhaps sometimes impatient about progress and choleric, yet over tea there would be expostulations, explanations, extenuations, ending in frank accord. He concocted a rebus, a flying horse with V in position on the saddle. He would begin by bald dogmatic assertion of his case along with depreciation of opposite views, so that within five minutes his opponents were upstanding and interrupting. He would not begin with generalities and soothing clearance of objections. But after things had quieted down he would then develop reasons which appealed to his audience. What if he did use the art of rhetoric - which is the art of speaking in language designed to persuade and impress - even the vituperation of Cicero (*tritium paro*, I disparage), and censure seniors of the General Medical Council or of the Council of the British Medical Association who were forgetting the origin in a Provincial Association governed by a Representative Meeting! If he miscalled the Home Secretary (Mr McKenna) Viscount Holloway (the prison in which the Suffragettes were confined), was it not only by sheer luck that the Minister escaped the responsibility of causing the death of women imprisoned there, in the course of being forcibly fed? His attack on tobacco, already mentioned, gained support during the War, by the 'disorderly heart' which caused so much invaliding of young soldiers. The battle about alcohol continued after him, particularly in the United States; he had produced on himself by inhaling ether the temporary loss of control which occurs when a young person with a full circulation takes a minute dose of alcohol on an empty stomach. The Registrar-General continued to report a high death-rate among doctors from alcoholism and cirrhosis. Even in Egypt Horsley sought to collect evidence against alcohol and the rum ration. He began attending the Metropolitan and Marylebone Branches, also the Annual Representative Meetings, of the British Medical Association. He was Chairman of the Representative Meeting from 1902-1906 and continued a member until 1912. Reforms desired by the representatives, advocated by him, have led to an increase of the Association to include more than two-thirds of the whole profession. There was a temporary resignation of consultants over so-called trade-union methods which did not concern consultants personally. Horsley suffered their opposition, but many of them drifted back quietly into the Association after his death. He was elected President of the Medical Defence Union at a critical juncture in 1892, and occupied the Chair until in 1897 he was elected upon the General Medical Council as one of three direct representatives of the profession. He went to it, as he said, to stir it up. He was re-elected for a second term, at the end of which he did not seek re-election, as he deemed that his objectives had been reached. The one lack of success in relation to the Medical Act of 1858 concerned unqualified practice to which the public accorded support. Improved death registration, medical inspection and treatment of school-children, a Ministry of Health, general improvement in the scientific side of medical education, sick medical insurance and an improved contract practice, State registration of nurses referred to in one of his last letters from Mesopotamia - on all these matters Horsley was in the forefront of the battle, and the subsequent victories enhance his fame. The seat in Parliament for which he was most fitted as an independent Member was that at the University of London, but at the general election in 1910 he had to oppose the sitting Member, Sir Philip Magnus, who had coached him for the Matriculation, and the consultants who had seceded from the British Medical Association voted against him. He was adopted by the North Islington Liberals and Radicals and might have been helped by the University College connection and by the women, including the nurses who canvassed for Sir Richard Barnet when he got in for St Pancras. But Horsley retired when adopted by Market Harborough in January, 1913. Unfortunately the apple of discord was thrown by the Suffragettes, then militant, damaging property and getting themselves forcibly fed in prisons. Between January, 1914, and May, 1915, he was approached by four other constituencies, the last being Gateshead, which he declined on May 17th, 1915, as "certainly anxious to get into Parliament" but just leaving for Egypt. His last political service was rendered between January and August 1914 on the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases which eventuated in the Government subsidy of hospital treatment. Concerning the religion of such a man, the chapter headed "Brotherhood Addresses" in Paget's book is to be noted. At the outbreak of the War in August, 1914, Horsley ranked as Captain RAMC (T), with previous non-commissioned rank in the Artist Volunteers. He was the one surgeon competent, as an experimental pathologist and surgeon, to have saved lives in those suffering from head injuries or tetanus - an attainment which had to await acquirement of knowledge by others before it could take effect - nor later had he opportunity given him of treating head injuries at an early stage, except after one minor affair against the Senussi on the western border of Egypt. In May, 1915, he was appointed Surgeon to the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force with the rank of Colonel AMS. He served at the base in Egypt, and visited Gallipoli and Mudros. Learning of conditions in Mesopotamia, he volunteered and proceeded there in May, 1916. On June 7th he wrote noting the absence of infusion apparatus for the treatment of cholera, having found a medical officer using a teapot as a substitute. He was not foolhardy; he was not boastful of his resistance as a teetotaller and non-smoker; it was his duty to make a round of hospital visits, and as there was no available conveyance he had to walk across sand with a moist temperature above 110° F in the shade. He was taken ill on July 15th at Amerah, with headache and a temperature of 104° F; no malaria organisms were found in the blood, no enteric organisms. The next day he was unconscious, with a temperature of 108° F. After his death there developed the treatment of heat-stroke by venesection and infusion, based on the experiments by Wooldridge which Horsley had watched in the Brown Laboratory twenty-seven years before - namely, the bleeding of a dog and the immediate infusion of an equivalent amount of fluid. He died at 8.30 pm on July 16th, 1916, at the Rawal Pindi Hospital, and was buried in the Amerah Cemetery, some 80 to 100 of the medical staff attending the funeral. Many honours came to Horsley in the course of his life. He was awarded the Cameron Prize by the University of Edinburgh in 1893; a Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1904; the Fothergillian Gold Medal of the Medical Society of London in 1896; and the Lannelongue Prize and Gold Medal at Paris in 1911. He was elected a Foreign Associate of the French Academy of Medicine in 1910, and a member of the Society of Upsala in succession to Lord Lister in 1912. The Victor Horsley Memorial Lecture was instituted in his memory. The first lecture was delivered at the Royal Society of Medicine on Oct 23rd, 1923, by Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer, FRS, Professor of Physiology in the University of Edinburgh, and previously Professor of Physiology and a colleague of Horsley at University College, London. This lecture, on "The Relations of Physiology and Surgery", was published in the *British Medical Journal* (1923, ii, 739). The second lecture, by Wilfred Trotter, MS, FRCS, Surgeon to University College Hospital, assistant to and colleague of Horsley, was delivered at the British Medical Association on July 9th, 1926, the title being, "On the Insulation of the Nervous System"; it may be read in the *British Medical Journal* (1926, ii, 103). The third lecture was delivered by Sir Thomas Lewis on July 16th, 1929, on "Observations relating to the Mechanism of Raynaud's Disease" (*Brit Med Jour*, 1929, ii, 111)
Resource Identifier RCS: E002267
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset