William St Clair Symmers, Musgrave Professor of Pathology, Queen's University Belfast 1904-1930. Photograph after Wm. L. Allison, 1915.

William St Clair Symmers (one of four medical doctors to bear that name) was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and in 1887 graduated in medicine at the University of Aberdeen. He worked as a pathologist and studied at the Institut Pasteur and in Berlin (Koch's Hygiene Institute in the Friedrich Wilhelm University and at the Charité under Virchow). From 1897 to 1904 he was Professor of Pathology and Bacteriology at the Government Medical School, Cairo, and pathologist to the Government Hospital Kasr-el-Aini. From 1904 to his death in 1937 he worked in Belfast, from 1904 to 1929 as Musgrave Professor of Pathology (information kindly supplied by his son William St Clair Symmers, November 1993)