Hawking, Frank

A. Personal - This section includes papers and correspondence relating to his research work and references for colleagues and students, as well as more personal pursuits including his gardening log and personal letters to his friends and family, including his son, Stephen Hawking.
B. Scientific Notes and Files - This section includes detailed notes, drawings, reviews and writing on research work in the field of immuniology and parasitology. This includes both Hawkings' own work and the papers of others.
C. Photographs - This section includes photographs and negatives mostly taken by Hawking relating to his work on parasitic infection. They show patients across Africa and Asia as well as the areas he was studying and people going about their day to day lives. Some pictures include Hawking, or other doctors and researchers, at work.
D. Published Material - This section includes published papers and reprints of works relating to the study and research of immuniology and parasitology, including papers by Frank Hawking.

1929-1985

17 boxes

Frank Hawking was born in 1905 and trained in medicine at University College, Oxford (which his son, the cosmologist Stephen Hawking, was also to attend) and St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, qualifying MRCS and LRCP in 1929. He specialised in chemotherapy and tropical disease, working at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and taking his MD in 1933 with a thesis on drug resistance in trypanosomes; he developed this in subsequent work on the uptake of acriflavine by the parasites.

In 1937 he was awarded at Medical Research Council fellowship to East Africa, where he worked on trypanosomiasis and, for the first time, filariasis. In 1939 he joined the Medical Research Council's staff and during the Second World War worked on malaria and on wounds; he developed the means of avoiding gas gangrene through the use of sulphonamides. He developed this work on the pharmacology of sulphonamides after the War. He continued to work on filariasis and malaria, looking particularly at their periodicity; he became president of teh International Filariasis Association.

He travelled widely and was involved in the setting up of the Filariasis Research Unit in Tanga, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1948 and the chemotherapy department of the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow, India, in 1958-1959. He died in 1986, survived by his wife and four children.

His obituary appears in the British Medical Journal, vol 293, 16th August 1986 (p.455).

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