Edward George Tandy Liddell, 25 March 1895 - 17 August 1981

Abstract

Edward George Tandy Liddell, the second and younger son of Dr John Liddell, a physician of Harrogate, was born on 25 March 1895. ‘In the first three winters of existence,’ he wrote in his personal memoir, ‘he had bouts of pneumonia which deprived him permanently of really robust health, but he limited his way of life and escaped further serious illnesses.’ After attending two local ‘dame schools’ he was sent to Summer Fields, Oxford, in 1905; from there, in 1909, he won a scholarship at Shrewsbury but chose instead to go to Harrow , where he spent two years on the classical side before transferring to science. At the end of 1913 he left school and lived for 6 months with families in Germany, at Bonn and Frankfurt-on-the-Main; and in October 1914 he went up to a ‘fast-emptying Oxford’ to read medicine as a member of Trinity College. Having obtained a first class honours degree in Physiology in 1918, he became an assistant at the Serum Department of the Lister Institute at Elstree under A. T. MacConkey. He was elected to a Senior Demyship at Magdalen College. He began his clinical studies at St Thomas’s Hospital in January 1919, qualifying B.M., B.Ch. Oxon. in July 1921. During those years of steady work he evidently learned to spend his energies to best advantage. Often he felt too tired to read in the evenings. It turned out that his heart had been damaged. Sir James Mackenzie gave him a Delphic prognosis: ‘take care of your heart, and it will last you as long as you need it’. In old age he recalled that Lady Osier once said to him: ‘you look like a lazy man to me’. But no one who was close to him, and knew how much work he got through, could have so misread his calm manner, his economy of movement, and his deliberate pace.