Simpson , Sir , William John Ritchie , 1855-1931 , Knight , physician and specialist in tropical medicine

Born, 1855; attended school in Jersey, graduated MB CM at Aberdeen University in 1876, and in 1880 proceeded MD (Aberdeen) and took the diploma of public health at Cambridge; medical officer of health at Aberdeen, 1881; medical officer of health for Calcutta, 1886; chair of hygiene at King's College, London, 1898-1923; co-founder of the London School of Tropical Medicine; lectured on tropical hygiene at the London School of Tropical Medicine, 1898-1923; taught hygiene at the London School of Medicine for Women, 1900-1914; member of a commission to inquire into dysentery and enteric fever among the troops in South Africa, 1900; commissioner to investigate plague in Hong Kong, 1902; investigated sanitation in Singapore, 1906; investigated plague on the Gold Coast, and public health in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Southern Nigeria, 1908; reported on plague and public health in east Africa, Uganda, and Zanzibar, 1913, member of a yellow fever commission in west Africa; studied sanitation and plague in the mines and mining villages in the Gold Coast and the Asante kingdom, 1924; co-founder of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases at Putney, where he became the first Director of Tropical Hygiene, and physician to the attached hospital, 1926; visited Chester-Beatty group of copper mines in Northern Rhodesia, 1929; died, 1931.