William John Ritchie Simpson (1855-1931): public health and tropical medicine.

Simpson's long working life covered a wide field. The pioneering nature of his work in public health and tropical hygiene involved a number of appointments at home and abroad. He worked in Aberdeen as Medical Officer of Health, in India as Health Officer for Calcutta, and in London he taught as Professor of Hygiene at King's College, becoming one of the founders of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The knowledge and experience gained was useful later when he travelled widely abroad as an adviser. He made tropical hygiene his own speciality and became an authority in the British Empire. William Simpson was born in Glasgow on 27 April 1855. Details of his early life are scanty.' His parents died when he was young, and he was at school in Jersey and a medical student in Aberdeen. The staff at the Medical School included some notable men, including "Barron" William Pirrie, who combined the chair of surgery with a flourishing practice and an arduous daily routine of early-morning writing.2 Simpson graduated in 1876 with "honourable distinction",3 but the next few years are not well documented. There is evidence to suggest that he may have been a medical assistant in a practice in Huddersfield,4 and around 1878 was on the staffofHaydock Lodge Retreat near Newton-le-Willows.5 Simpson then moved to Kent, where he was Medical Officer for St Mary's District of Dover Poor Law Union and public vaccinator, as well as holding an appointment at a convalescent home.6 With an Aberdeen MD and the Cambridge certificate in Sanitary Science (later DPH) he applied for the vacant post of Medical Officer of Health for Aberdeen. Francis Ogston, the City's "first significant M.O.H." had combined his public office from 1862 with an academic chair.7 His pluralism was the subject of a forthright comment by Edwin Chadwick in 1877: "Full five hundred and fifty lives a year are sacrificed even in Aberdeen, by its existing insanitary conditions. I find that a public health officer is appointed with a salary of£50 a year. He has, I am informed, £50 more