Burrows , Harold , 1875-1955 , surgeon and biologist

Harold Burrows was born in India in 1875, the son of Surgeon-Major E P Burrows of the Bombay Army. Harold Burrows was educated at Marlborough and St Bartholomew's Hospital. After qualifying in 1899 he became a prosector at the Royal College of Surgeons and was also an assistant editor of The Hospital. His first surgical appointment was in 1903 at the Bolingbroke Hospital, Wandsworth, and in 1905 he became senior assistant surgeon to the Seamen's Hospital, Greenwich. In 1907 he joined the staff of the Royal Portsmouth Hospital. As a Territorial he was mobilised on the outbreak of the 1914-1918 war, served in France with the 20th General Hospital and later became consultant surgeon to the First Army and to the Army of the Rhine, with the rank of Colonel. He was twice mentioned in dispatches and created CBE in 1919. After the war he returned to Portsmouth, where he organised the collection of funds for providing orthopaedic clinics. In 1920 he was awarded the Jacksonian Prize of the Royal College of Surgeons for his essay, The results and treatment of gun shot injuries of the blood vessels. A regular worker in the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons, Burrows was also a Hunterian Professor in 1922, 1933, and 1935. He published two very successful books Pitfalls of Surgery, and Surgical Instruments and Appliances. He became an experimental biologist at the research laboratories of the Royal Cancer Hospital (now the Chester Beatty Research Institute), in 1925. At the age of 63 he was awarded a PhD from London University. His major work The Biological Action of Sex Hormones was published in 1944 when Burrows was 69. He died in 1955.