Frederic Wood Jones, 1879-1954

Abstract

Frederic Wood Jones was born in London on 23 January 1879, the son of an architect of Welsh descent. As a boy he was a keen entomologist and showed an unusual interest in all branches of natural history. These pursuits engaged much of his attention during his school days and, with a number of interruptions due to ill-health, no doubt accounted for the fact that his school career was quite undistinguished, and that he also found some difficulty in passing the examination for the London University Matriculation. He finally matriculated in 1897 and entered the London Hospital as a medical student. It was here that he first showed evidence of his intellectual ability, for he won a succession of scholarships and prizes in anatomy, physiology and clinical medicine. It was at the London Hospital, also, that Wood Jones came under the influence of Chalmers Mitchell and Arthur Keith, to both of whom he later recorded his debt of gratitude for their stimulating influence. He qualified with the degrees of M.B., B.S. in 1904, and even while a student he had already contributed to the Proceedings of the Journal of Anatomy & Physiology (as it was then called) short notes on the musculature of the bladder and urethra, the development of the fundus of the stomach, and a method of reconstruction of a human embryo by photographic reproductions of serial sections. These early publications showed a certain originality of approach which was later to become a very characteristic quality of Wood Jones’s work. It is not surprising, therefore, that his teachers and friends hoped that, on qualification, he would settle down to an academic career in London. But, against all their advice, he left England in January 1905 to take up an appointment as Medical Officer to the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company in the Far East, and, after a short stay in Singapore, sailed for the Cocos-Keeling Islands. We do not know what decided him on this course, but it clearly fits into the pattern of the whole of his subsequent career, for he was essentially a wanderer and a seeker after adventure; indeed, he never stayed in any of the numerous positions which he held for more than a few years.