BJOG Editors‐in‐chief since 1902

Abstract

Charles James Cullingworth was born in Leeds in 1841. His father was a businessman who sent Charles to Wesley College in Sheffield, where he passed the matriculation examination of the University of London in 1858. After helping his father for several years with a view to becoming a lawyer, his father died, and Charles was able to sell the business and change to a medical career. He was initially apprenticed to a general practitioner while attending a course at the Leeds School of Medicine, qualifying as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1865. After 18 months in general practice, he was elected resident physician assistant at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, and was so efficient that he took over the substantive post within weeks. In 1872, needing an improved income, he took up the post of Police Surgeon in Manchester, which he then held until 1882, meanwhile becoming a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London. In 1873, he was also appointed surgeon to St Mary's Hospital for Women in Manchester. Wanting to develop an academic component to his police work, in 1879 he was appointed lecturer in medical jurisprudence at Owens College (founded in 1851, subsequently merging with the federal Victoria University, which in 1903–4 split into the Universities of Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool) and took a Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree at Durham University. Because of his interests in obstetrics and gynaecology, he was appointed to the chair of obstetric medicine at Owens College in 1885. While in Manchester, he was honorary librarian and secretary to the Manchester Medical Society. Having developed a large and lucrative private practice, and established himself as a senior academic within the North of England, in 1888 he was persuaded to take up the post of obstetric physician to St Thomas’ Hospital in London. It was here that he did his most important research, studying the pathology of pelvic inflammation, and its relationship with ectopic pregnancy. He published his book ‘Diseases of the Fallopian Tubes’ in 1895. He championed the admission of women to the medical register, the registration and training of midwives, and popularised the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes on puerperal fever (Holmes, like Semmelweiss, attributed it to inadequate antisepsis). He wrote many papers in major medical journals, and was fond of quoting Tennyson and Browning. A keen supporter of the establishment of our journal, it was entirely appropriate for him to become editor in 1906, although he had by then already been suffering angina for 6 years. He died of a heart attack in May 1908. Happily married to Emily Mary Freeman, with one daughter, he was widely liked and admired by his colleagues for being a ‘willing slave to the dictates of his conscience’. In a letter to the Debating Society at Leeds, he declared that only putting the patients’ needs above financial considerations could ‘raise the medical life out of the category of the sordid and self-seeking into that of the unselfish and ennobling’. Philip Steer is Emeritus Editor, BJOG. For a full disclosure of interests, please go to www.BJOG.org. Photo source: reproduced from BMJ, 1908;1:1269 with permission from BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.