Warrington Yorke 1883-1943

Abstract

Warrington Yorke, who died on 24 April 1943, at the age of sixty, had been connected with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine for thirty-six years, and at the time of his death was one of the most outstanding figures in this field of medicine. During the years following his first appointment in 1907, he took an active part in the work and development of the School, and created for himself a reputation as a teacher and research worker of the first order. His influence was world-wide, and was never greater than at the time of his untimely death, which deprived tropical medicine of one of its most resolute and distinguished leaders. Born at Lancaster on 11 April 1883, Warrington Yorke was the eldest of four brothers and two sisters. His father was a Wesleyan minister—the Rev. Henry Lefroy Yorke, M.A., B.D. He received his early education at University School, Southport, where he was a pupil for ten years. Following this he spent three years at Epworth College, Rhyl. In 1900 he entered the University of Liverpool as a medical student, and there had a distinguished career, being awarded the Senior Lyon Jones Scholarship and the Derby Exhibition in Clinical Medicine. He obtained the degrees of M.B., Ch.B. in 1905 at the age of twenty-two, and was for six months house physician to Sir James Barr at the Royal Infirmary. Following this he was house surgeon at the same institution. In 1906 he was elected to the Holt Fellowship in Physiology, and studied under Sir Charles Sherrington, at whose suggestion he joined in 1907, the year in which he obtained the degree of M.D., the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, then in the ninth year of its history, and commenced his study of tropical diseases and parasitology which was to occupy his attention for the rest of his life. The enthusiasm with which he threw himself into the career he had chosen was well illustrated by his immediate acceptance of the invitation to accompany Wakelin Barratt to Nyasaland to study black-water fever. This was the nineteenth expedition of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to the tropics for the purpose of investigating tropical diseases.