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.
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