Sir John Rose Bradfor, Bart. 1863-1935

Sir John Bradford was born in London, May 7, 1863, and died there on April 7, 1935. Excepting four years of war service in France, all his working life was spent in London, where he soon gained a position of peculiar importance midway between physiology and medicine that enabled him to influence and steadily bend the growth of British medicine into a closer union with the biological sciences. His own research work had been in physiological laboratories, and it was of such high repute as to win for him all the privileges of the commonwealth of science. In the profession of medicine, to which he moved from physiology, he soon displayed such clinical powers as gave him firm authority as a physician and ultimately brought him to the highest post of all, the Presidency of the College of Physicians. But he had little desire for consulting practice, and his steadfast aim from mid-life onwards was the furtherance of medicine as a science in itself. He did not himself do any notable work in the field of clinical science nor did he attempt to define his aim by many published writings ; rather he chose to exercise his influence personally, uplifting the merits of scientific thought in all his clinical teaching and taking firm hold of every occasion that gave him power to control practical plans for the scientific advancement of medicine.