University of Bristol: Chair of Anatomy

Abstract

PROF. S. E. WHITNALL has retired from the chair of anatomy in the University of Bristol on reaching the retiring age. His going will be a loss to British anatomy in many ways, for he was far more than an anatomist. He was a contributor to the columns of Punch, and the author of that most human little publication “The Study of Anatomy”. Had Prof. Whitnall never made any other contribution to the study of anatomy, that publication would have endeared him to many. To his contemporaries he will ever be remembered as the most humorous and human of companions; to the present generation he may be no more than the respected author of the “Anatomy of the Human Orbit”. But despite the attack of the B.N”.A. on eponymous nomenclature, he may claim in ‘Whitnall's tubercle’ to be the only living anatomist whose name remains attached to a definite structure in the human body. His last rival in this regard was the late C. B. Lockwood of St. Bartholomew's. Prof. Whitnall hails from Lancashire and he entered Owens College in 1894. Afterwards he was associated with St. Thomas's and for long with Oxford. In 1919, after war service with the Oxford Hussars, he went as professor of anatomy to McGill University, Montreal. There he remained until 1934, when he took the chair at Bristol, from which he is now retiring.