Person

Rolleston, Humphry Davy, Sir, 1862-1944

1862-1944

Sir Humphry Davy Rolleston was born on June 21, 1862, in St. Michaels, Oxfordshire, England.

He was a British physician. He was educated at Marlborough College, St. John's College, and Cambridge University. After clinical training at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, he received his M.B. (1888) and M.D. (1892) degrees from Cambridge University. He worked as a physician at St. George's Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, London, from 1891 to 1919. During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), he served with the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital in Pretoria. During World War I, he was a consulting surgeon and surgeon rear-admiral with the Royal Navy. Rollestone gave the 1895 Goulstonian Lectures, the 1919 Lumleian Lectures, and the 1928 Harveian Oration. He served as President of the London Medical Society in 1904, the Royal Society of Medicine (1918-1920) and the Royal College of Physicians (1922-1925). He chaired the Rolleston Committee formed in 1924. From 1923 to 1932, he was Physician-in-Ordinary to King George V. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1918, created a baronet, of Upper Brook Street in the Parish of Saint George, Hanover Square, in the County of London, in June 1925 and made a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order (GCVO) in 1929. Rolleston was President of the Eugenics Society from 1933 to 1935. In 1925, he was appointed the Regius Professor of Physics (Cambridge) and remained in this position until he retired in 1932. In 1926, he became President of the Medical Society of London. He contributed to the revised and updated version of Encyclopedia Britannica ("Medicine, General"). A small collection of his papers is held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

In 1894, he married Lizette Eila Harriet Ogilvy (1869–1949). He died on September 23, 1944, in Haslemere, Surrey, England.