King , Maurice Henry , b 1927 , physician and research fellow

Maurice Henry King was born in Hatton, Ceylon, in 1927. He was educated at Cambridge and St Thomas's Hospital, where he was a Bristowe Medalist in pathology in 1951, and a house physician in 1952. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1993. He spent 20 years as a doctor in Africa, in Northern Rhodesia, Uganda, Zambia and Kenya, spending five years in each. He started in Africa as a pathologist in 1957, and then moved into public health in 1963. He then began to write books to be used by health workers in the developing world. One of these was Primary Surgery (two volumes) which has been widely acclaimed as a standard work. He was a Medical Officer with the World Health Organisation working in Indonesia, from 1972-1977. He worked for the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) on projects to assemple appropriate technologies in district hospitals, and was based in Kenya, from 1979-1984. King is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Leeds, and is concerned with demographic entrapment.