Thomas Renton Elliott, 1877-1961

Abstract

T. R. Elliott, born in 1877, was elected to the Fellowship of The Royal Society in 1913, before he was 36 years old; and his election, thus rather early in his career, was certainly made in recognition of the quite unusual distinction and brilliant promise of the experimental researches in physiology, which he had carried out at Cambridge by 1906, and of which he had published the results, with his conclusions, in several remarkable papers, between 1904 and 1907. College and University post-graduate studentships had enabled him thus to stay in Cambridge for the five years following his graduation in 1901, and there to concentrate his activities and interests on these experimental studies. And then, in 1906, at the age of 29, he left Cambridge to enter as a student at University College Hospital, London, with the immediate purpose of completing his clinical curriculum and his qualifying graduation in medicine. Among those who had followed and admired the progress of what he had already then achieved, there were probably many to whom it would have seemed natural to expect that the years of clinical study and qualification would prove for him, as they had done for others, to be an interlude, the experience gained in which would strengthen his equipment and his claim for advancement in an academic career, most obviously perhaps in physiology, but, in any case, in one or another of the experimental disciplines which had by then already become recognized as contributory to the scientific background of medicine.