The School in 1929

During July the Archives Service has been celebrating the 90^th anniversary of the Keppel Street building with a display on the history of the building, and regular tweets and blog posts. For our final blog post, we thought that we’d concentrate on the staff and students who were at the School in 1929.

The Director of the School in 1929 was Sir Andrew Balfour, he was a physician who became interested in tropical medicine through his friendship with Sir Patrick Manson and he studied at the School in 1902. He was then appointed Director of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratory at Khartoum and Medical Officer of Health to that city. In 1913, he returned to England and founded and directed the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research and organised what was to become the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science. He undertook a number of roles during World War One and worked in Mesopotamia, East Africa and Egypt. He was appointed Director of the School in 1923 and became the first Director of the new London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine when it received its Royal Charter in 1924. He was knighted in 1930 but unfortunately died on 1 January 1931.

 

In 1929, the divisions and departments of the School and key staff were as follows:

• Public Health, Professor Jameson
• Bacteriology and Immunology, Professor Topley
• Bio-Chemistry and Chemistry as Applied to Hygiene, Professor Raistrick
• Epidemiology and Vital Statistics, Professor Greenwood
• Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
  • Medical Zoology, Professor Leiper
  • Helminthology, Professor Leiper
  • Protozoology, J G Thomson
  • Entomology, P A Buxton
  • Institute of Agricultural Parasitology, Professor Leiper

There were 166 students who added the School during 1929 who took the following courses:

• Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ordinary course): 147
• Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (special courses) : 2
• Bacteriology and Immunology (advanced course): 5
• Epidemiology and Vital Statistics (ordinary course): 10
• Epidemiology and Vital Statistics (special courses: 2

102 students passed the School examination in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene out of 110 competing, of this number 13 gained distinction.

71 students gained the DTM&H (Eng) out of 116 competing.

The image below shows which services the students belonged to and the destination of the students.

Flicking through the annual report for 1929, I was fascinated to see that under the Department of Entomology report there is a list of gifts to the department which include:

• Living larvae and pupae of Halticid beetle used as arrow poison
• Fleas, 39 species new to collection
• Mosquitoes, 34 species new to collection

For more information on the history of the School, please contact the Archives Service at archives@lshtm.ac.uk