Family Influences on A. E. Garrod’s Thinking

Abstract

The author of Inborn Errors of Metabolism and Inborn Factors in Disease had a somewhat unexceptional early career. Born in London in 1857, he received a first class degree at Cambridge in Natural Sciences before entering St. Bartholomew’s Hospital to become qualified in medicine in 1884. Apart from a stimulating year spent in Vienna where he learned about some of the new scientific techniques in medicine, he spent the next 7 years working in his father’s West End practice. But Archibald Garrod soon became dissatisfied with general medicine and at the age of 35 took up an appointment as Assistant Physician to the Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street. It was at this time that he began his work on rare childhood diseases such as alkaptonuria and struck up an important friendship with Gowland Hopkins, one of the most distinguished biochemists of the day. Eventually at the age of 55, 3 years after the publication of his Croonian Lectures on Inborn Errors, Archibald was made a consultant physician at St. Batholomew’s. But it was not long before his career was to be interrupted by the First World War.