Medical Alumni of Sherborne School

Standing on the shoulders of giants. The medical alumni of Sherborne. (Part One) Peter Stride Introduction “If I have seen further it’s by standing on the shoulder of giants.” Isaac Newton, 1675. The latest publication on the history of Sherborne School is an interesting and evocative pleasure to read. Old, Yet Ever Young, a fascinating and extensively researched history of Sherborne School by Patrick Francis, recalls five formative years of my adolescence, which with previous years at Mount House School, Tavistock, and subsequent years in the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, opened the author’s door to a fifty-year career in Medicine. Challenging, rewarding, tiring, yet highly recommended. Interesting details of one’s masters’ past academic, sporting, and military prowess were often lost on recalcitrant schoolboys! Francis details brilliance in the school sporting arenas, and very many OS in military, ecclesiastic, artistic, political and academic circles of alumni. Alan Turing, twice winner of the School maths prize is deserved recognised, as are two medical knights and five Fellows of the Royal Society. Yet amongst the medical OS there are numerous giants of medicine and other sciences well worthy of further attention. Alumni whose contribution to science has endured a century or two. The author as a specialist physician happily admits to bias in this concept. Perhaps little has changed in sixty years when progress to classics at Oxbridge or to Sandhurst were worthy of esteemed gatherings at Sherborne, and entry to a London Teaching Hospital was a slight improvement on real estate as planned by a contemporary. A contemporary who may have been more successful financially than us all except of course the celebrities. The author presents the alumni who made considerable contributions to the advance of health care over the last four centuries. Part one details those thirteen doctors listed among the eminent alumni on the Wikipedia School webpage. Part two details those selected by the author from amongst the other two-hundred and eighty- four medical graduates listed in The Sherborne Register, 1550-1950 (Fourth Edition). Peter Stride (g59-64) MB BS (Middlesex Hospital, London), MRCP (UK) FRACP, FRCPEdin, FRCP, D.Med (research) UQ. Retired, previous senior specialist physician, Queensland Health, and Associate Professor, University of Queensland School of Medicine. 1 Nathaniel Highmore (1613-1685) MB MD. Nathaniel Highmore (1613-1685) was born in Fordingbridge and entered Sherborne in about 1625, the first recorded doctor since the school foundation in 1550. He attended Queen’s College and Trinity College, Oxford between 1632 and 1639, graduating MB in 1641, and MD in 1642. He befriended the celebrated physician, William Harvey, in Oxford when Harvey came to Oxford with Charles II after the indecisive battle of Edgehill in 1642. Highmore was best known for his anatomical studies, which had developed dissecting dogs, sheep, and an ostrich! He published an accurate paper on human anatomy in 1651, ‘Corporis Humani disquisitio anatomica in qua sanguinis circulationem prosequutus est.’ which he dedicated to Harvey. It was best known for his description of the circulation and the maxillary sinus, known as the antrum of Highmore. His interest had been stimulated by a female patient, in whom an abscess of this cavity was drained by the extraction of the left canine tooth. He also displayed an early interest in psychiatry publishing on hypochondria, hysteria and the benefit of sympathy on wound healing. Perhaps of more interest to Shirburnians, he was first to describe the scrotal septum which separates the two testicles and is also named after him. The same year he returned to Sherborne where he practiced as a surgeon and a physician for the rest of his working days. He never took fees from the clergy. He also became a magistrate for Dorsetshire. When he died, he was buried on the south side of the chancel of the church at Purse Caundle, where his father had been rector. In his will he endowed an exhibition to Oxford from Sherborne. 2 Beverley Robinson Morris (1816-1883) MA MD Morris trained in medicine at Trinity College Dublin after leaving Sherborne. The fourth son of a Royal Naval Admiral and the son-in-law of a Naval Lieutenant, perhaps this was the standard fourth best option after the family title and estate, the services, and the church! Medicine was not where his main interest lay. He qualified MA and subsequently MD. He worked in Nottingham, where he founded the Hospital for Women and Children, and in York, and as physician to the York Dispensary in the 1840s. He specialised in the treatment of the insane published an article, ‘A theory as to the Proximate causes of Insanity and Observations on the construction of Hospitals for the insane’ in 1844. Like his brother, the Rev. Francis Orpen Morris, he was also a well-known naturalist who published books about birds. Beverley Morris published a two-volume work, British Game Birds and Wild Fowl in 1855. A review in the Daily News stated that the book ‘has a unique position amongst works of its class. The sixty hand-coloured plates are splendidly executed’. Morris was also editor of The Naturalist, a popular monthly magazine illustrative of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Searches today advertise his books and his most realistic and accurate pictures of birds but say little of his medicine. Individual bird prints are available for some 30 pounds and the whole book for some 500 pounds. 3 Francis Woodforde (?-1894) MD Woodforde’s secondary education was partly at Sherborne where he entered between 1823 and 1835, and partly at Christ’s Hospital, Horsham. He proceeded to Edinburgh University where he graduated MD. He worked as a physician in Taunton and published five letters in the BMJ. The most indignant letter to the BMJ in 1835 relates to an internal dispute in the Taunton Hospital between the administration and the medical staff in which the doctors resign en-mass. The York letters of 1855 refer to an internal dispute amongst the members of the British Medical Association. He was not a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. An enthusiastic ornithologist, he left his large collection of birds to several museums. 4 Charles Hathaway (1817-1903) MB BS MRCS MD Hathaway left Sherborne for Guy’s and St Thomas’s Medical School graduating with MB BS, MRCS, MD. He joined the East India Company in 1843. In 1852 he was promoted from Civil Surgeon to Inspector-General of prisons in the Punjab where his reforms reduced mortality. He became Sanitary Commissioner in 1862 and corresponded with Florence Nightingale over sanitary conditions. For the last two years of his career from 1864-1866, became private secretary to John Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence and Viceroy of India. 5 John Hawkes (c1820-1904) MRCS MD Hawkes attended St Andrew’s University and St Bartholomew’s Hospital after leaving Sherborne. At Bart’s he won the Wix students prize and graduated with MRCS. Subsequently he gained an MD. He published four brief case reports in the Lancet, ‘A case of tobacco poisoning in a child’, ‘The causes of insanity’, ‘On enlargement of the thyroid gland with proptosis’, and ‘On traumatic gangrene’. 6 Arthur William May (1854-1925) LRCP MRCS FRCS KCB Son of the Rev Henry May, vicar of St Petherwin, Cornwall. After attending Sherborne School where he had been a keen sportsman, he graduated in medicine from King’s College Hospital, London with LRCP, MRCS. He entered the Royal Navy and was soon on active service. He was aboard HMS Achilles during the Egyptian war of 1882. He participated in the Suakin expedition, two actions led by Major-General Sir Gerald Graham against the Mahdist forces under Osman Digna in February 1884 and in March 1885 near Suakin on the north-east coast of Sudan. May was decorated with the medal and the Khedive’s Bronze Star. He participated in the Nile expedition in the attempted relief of General Gordon aboard the HMS Sophia in 1885 and was mentioned in dispatches for attending the wounded under fire. May was promoted Staff Surgeon in 1890 and Fleet Surgeon in 1898. He was principal Medical Officer abord HMS Britannia from 1901-1904 and was promoted to Deputy Director General of the Naval Medical Department in 1905. He became Medical Officer in charge of the Royal Naval Hospital in Chatham in 1909 and was awarded the CB in 1911. In 1914 he was promoted to Surgeon Vice-Admiral and Director-General of the Navy and was awarded the KCB as well as being elected a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. As Medical Director-General during WW1, he was responsible for the vital provision of an enormous increase in required medical services throughout the Empire and in every theatre of Naval warfare. Immediately, he greatly expanded the workforce with the call-up of surgeons from the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and volunteer temporary surgeons, as well as the commissioning of many new hospital ships. His acknowledgement of civilian consultants’ advice helped prevent the spread of cerebrospinal fever amongst sailors in the 1915 epidemic. Although he nominally retired from the Navy in 1917, he became deputy lieutenant of Cornwall, a JP and an active worker for the Red Cross. Obviously still possessed of the protestant work ethic instilled at Sherborne. 7 Henry Brougham Guppy (1854-1926) MB BC FRS FRSE FLS Guppy was born in Falmouth, the son of Thomas Stokes Guppy MRCS, MD, a local physician. Following education at Sherborne, he studied medicine, possibly with paternal encouragement, at Queen’s College, Birmingham, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London and Edinburgh University graduating MB CM.

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