Hope-Simpson, R. Edgar (1906-2003)

The following is an interim description which may change when detailed cataloguing takes place in future.

Records of the practice and of the attached Epidemiological Research Unit, comprising patient records, day books, journals etc., 1947-74, plus additional material relating to research.

1947-1978

6 transfer boxes, 1 outsize box 11 transfer boxes, 16 box files, 8 outsize volumes

Presented by Dr. Hope-Simpson in 1994 and 1995.

Robert Edgar Hope-Simpson, OBE, FRCGP, MRCS, LRCP (1906-2003) was a general practitioner based for much of his career in Cirencester, Gloucestershire.

R. Edgar Hope-Simpson was born in 1906, the son of the diplomat Sir John Hope-Simpson and his wife. He was educated at Gresham's School, Norfolk (1919-1925) before training in medicine at St. Thomas's Hospital, London, taking his MRCS and LRCP in 1932. It was whilst training here that he met Eleanor Dale, daughter of Sir Henry Dale (1875-1968), his first wife.

After qualification he worked first at the Dorset County Hospital and then in the general practice of Dr. Herbert Lake in Beaminster. He remained here throughout the Second World War, during which, as a Quaker, he registered as a conscientious objector. During these years in general practice he acquired an interest in how the records of a community's health could contribute to advances in epidemiology. After the War, in 1945, he moved to Cirencester, where he developed this interest. As well as running a popular general practice (1946-1976) he turned his practice headquarters into the Cirencester Research Unit, funded 1947-1973 by the Public Health Laboratory Service 1947-1973 and thereafter, until 1981, by the Department of Health and Social Security. (In addition, he served as pathologist at the Cirencester Memorial Hospital from 1946 to 1961.)

He researched and published particularly on infectious diseases such as herpes zoster and chickenpox. This research was crowned by his proof that shingles and chickenpox were caused by the same virus, which was capable of lying dormant in the body for many years before reappearing with different symptoms; he developed his theory by studying the isolated community of Yell in Shetland, backing it up from 1962 with new advances in microbiology, and announced his theory in the Albert Wander lecture in June 1964, which was published in 1965 as "The nature of herpes zoster: a long-term study and a new hypothesis" (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 58: 9-20). Later, he worked on the epidemiology of influenza.

His wife Eleanor died in 1997 after a long illness; he married his second wife, Julia, when he was in his 90s. He died in 2003, leaving his widow and four grandchildren.

Source: biographical notes held at the Royal College of General Practitioners, reused for his Wikipedia entry.

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