Dr. E. Ashworth Underwood (1899--1980).

Edgar Ashworth Underwood was bom in Dumfries on 9 March 1899. He was educated at the Dumfries Academy, a school of high standing, and finished his schooldays as Dux (head boy) of the modern side. War service (1917-1919) with the Cameron Highlanders in France followed (his regimental kilt long remained a treasured possession)..On demobilization he entered the University of Glasgow and there in 1924 he disconcerted the authorities by not only obtaining the M.A. and the medical qualifications of the M.B. and Ch.B (Commended), but also the B.Sc. in pure science; this achievement involved the complication of two examinations at the same time, which was solved by spending half the time in one and half the time in the other examination. His student career was marked by the vice-presidency of the Glasgow Medico-Chirurgical Society and the award ofthe Cullen medal for materia medica and the Hunter medals for midwifery and clinical surgery. He was fortunate that for this last subject he had as teacher that great surgeon, Sir William Macewen, the Regius Professor of Surgery, for whom he had great admiration. After a period as resident physician at the Western Infirmary, Glasgow, he entered the Public Health Service obtaining the D.P.H. in 1926 and serving as Assistant MOH in Glasgow and the County of Lanark. From 1929 he occupied posts of increasing importance Deputy MOH County Borough of Rotherham and Medical Superintendant of Oakwood Sanatorium, 1929-1931; Deputy MOH City of Leeds and Lecturer in Public Health, University of Leeds, 1932-1934; MOH Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch, 19341937; MOH and Chief School Medical Officer County Borough of West Ham, 19371945, a dock area that suffered the full force of the blitz. Underwood's earliest publications with which I am acquainted are concerned with tuberculosis and date from 1931, when he was at Rotherham. The most important was a textbook, A manual of tuberculosis, written for nurses, but largely rewritten for the third edition (1945) for the medical student and for all those concerned with the care of tuberculosis patients. A number of papers written between 1931 and 1945 relating to public health show his particular interest in epidemiology and statistics, an interest borne out by his being a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and, as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, a member ofthe Epidemiology Section from the 1930s and for a time Honorary Secretary of that Section. In 1936 he obtained his M.D. (highly commended) and in 1938 published an Annual report on the health servicesfor the year 1937, in the County Borough of West Ham, a work of460 pages that must be a model of its kind. From the early thirties Underwood's increasing devotion to the history of medicine became apparent. In 1932 he gave an interesting account of a pamphlet, Cholera Morbus, precautions, preventives, and remedies, printed in Doncaster in 1832. With his move to London he gave a number of scholarly papers to the History Section of the Royal Society ofMedicine: 'History ofthe 1832 cholera epidemic in Yorkshire' (1935), 'Lavoisier and the history of respiration' (1944), 'Medicine and science in the writings