FREDERIC WOOD JONES (1879-1954) AN OPTIMISTIC BIOLOGIST MICHAEL KELLY, M.D.* Frederic Wood Jones's prophetic genius permanently impressed his students and young graduates. Some ofthem (including me) he inspired for life. I have often wondered about the source ofhis magic. Last year while rereading Wilfred Trotter's Collected Papers (1) I came upon this sentence: "[John Hunter] was so resolutely modern in his attitudetowards the problems of life, and he accepted so wholeheartedly the working hypothesis oftheir solubility, that we are apt to forget the state ofknowledge of his time"—1728 to 1793. Then in a moment the truth came; the magnetism of Wood Jones came from an optimism inherited from Hunter—that firm belief that the problems of life could be solved. It was not an ineffective optimism holding vaguely that everything would come right of itself. The faith of Wood Jones was born of constructive thinking; it sprang from an immenseknowledge, rationally ordered,which ranged through past, present, and future and illuminated all living tilings. There are hundreds ofreferences to Hunter in his writings. In a lecture in Brisbane in 1931 (2) he said: The sphere ofJohn Hunter's activities was so boundless that anatomy was only one of the subjectsleavened byhis magictouch; nevertheless, he wrote large across the tombstone of pure descriptive anatomy "Structure is only the ultimate expression of function." Hunter left the anatomist with new ambitions, new ideals and new powers. . . . WoodJones had been a favored student ofSir Arthur Keith, a disciple ofeminent Darwinian Thomas Huxley. But he could not believe that the unity ofnature arose from chance groupings. His independent mind could not accept ready-made the opinions ofothers. He had been taught about nature red in tooth and claw as different species fought to survive. But * Institute ofRheumatology, 410 Albert Street, East Melbourne, Australia. 1 59 when he looked unprejudiced at nature, he saw an amazing harmony; everywhere structure was related to function. Soon he disagreed with orthodox biologists who were looking for makeshifts and chance adaptations as evidence of nature's clumsiness. Wood Jones believed that man differed so from anthropoids that he could not have descended from them; that in many ways man's skeleton is the more primitive. Man musthave had millions ofyears ofevolutionary independence to develop a skeleton so different from all others. Aberrant primate Tarsius, he said in 1919 (3), bore all criteria ofa common ancestor ofman and anthropoids. He did not change his mind (4). Corals and Ancient Bones; Primacy ofFunction IfWoodJoneshad stayedwithKeith,hewouldprobably haveremained a Darwinian. Not wanting early success, however, he went to see some ofthe unvisited parts of the world. During a year on the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean as medical officer to a telegraph company, he used his powers of observation and meditation, and ten articles about coral and fish appeared (5). Soon afterward he published Coral and Atolls (6), an extraordinary study of coral growth from a young medical graduate with no training in zoology. In 1907 and 1908 he was in Nubia with Grafton Elliot Smith on anthropo-archeological studies for the Egyptian Government. The massive reports were a great deal more readable than their like elsewhere (7). To the British MedicalJournal he sent from Africa a report on fractures in ancient human bones (8). Le Gros Clark remembers Wood Jones's contribution to the liveliness of a meeting of the Anatomical Society in 1913 "by the pertness and originality of the comments which he offered to discussions on a great variety of subjects. Obviously, he was a man of an unusually alert and inquiring mind, with a remarkable width ofknowledge on matters anatomical and anthropological" (9). To Clark, WoodJones's early writings were exciting, presenting new interpretations and novel points of view. In 1916 Arboreal Man (10) showed that he was diverging from accepted opinions on man's evolution. He had already seen a great anatomical gulfdividing man from the anthropoids; the human phylum must have separated from other animals a few million years ago. Wood Jones later wrote a great deal to show that structure is the 160 Michael Kelly · Frederic WoodJones Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter iaCu expression of function; that the part...