Edward Provan Cathcart, 1877 - 1954

Abstract

Edward Provan Cathcart died at his home in Glasgow on 18 February 1954, seven years after his retiral from the Regius Chair of Physiology in the University of Glasgow. His death has removed a well-known personality in academic circles in Scotland, a scientist of international reputation devoted in the broadest sense of the term to the study of his fellow men, and a man whose hum an sympathies and understanding had an influence on his associates which can hardly be over-estimated. E. P. Cathcart was born on 18 July 1877 in the town of Ayr. His forbears were practical people interested in agriculture and commerce, and in iron and steel. His father, Edward Moore Cathcart, was a merchant in the town of Ayr; his mother was the daughter of a rivet and bolt manufacturer whose home was at Invereck, near the village of Kilmun on the Firth of Clyde. His father died at the early age of 37, when Cathcart was only nine, and he with a younger brother and sister were brought up by the widowed mother. She, in addition to being a very good amateur painter who had gained several awards at the Glasgow School of Art, was in many ways a woman of intellectual attainment and personality.