Almroth Edward Wright, 1861-1947

Abstract

Almroth Wright’s life did not conform to the conventional pattern. As a boy he did not go to any school but was taught chiefly by tutors. As a graduate in medicine he did not follow any of the usual paths to a medical career; and when in due course he did embark on that career his road was never that of other men. His intellectual life too was remarkable in that it ran always in two separate streams—that of medical science on the one hand, and in broader philosophical speculations on the other. He was born on 10 August 1861 in Yorkshire, where his father, the Rev. Charles H. H. Wright, held a curacy. His mother was Ebba, daughter of Nils W. Almroth, Professor of Organic Chemistry in Stockholm and later Director of the Swedish Mint. Professor Almroth was also a Knight of the North Star and a friend of Berzelius. The Rev. Charles Wright held curacies in turn in Dresden, Boulogne and Belfast and in all these places the boy Almroth was taught by tutors and, no doubt, acquired the basis for that fluent command of German and French, which was to serve him so well in later life. His university education was at Trinity College, Dublin, where he took First-Class Honours in modern literature, and then graduated in medicine (1883). The ordinary practice of medicine, however, did not appeal to him and for some years he seems to have been in doubt as to the best course to take. After working for a time in Germany under Cohnheim, Weigert and Ludwig at Leipzig, and also visiting Strasburg and Marburg, he returned to England and took a studentship at the Inns of Court, reading Jurisprudence and International Law with a view to the Bar. But his heart was in medical science and he soon abandoned law in order to help Wooldridge and Victor Horsley, who were both working (on the coagulation of blood and on the central nervous system respectively) at the Brown Institution in Wandsworth, one of the few laboratories at that time where medical research was being carried on. This was unpaid work, done in the early mornings and the evenings. A clerkship at the Admiralty during the day provided him with a slender livelihood. His association with Wooldridge led in due course to the offer of a Demonstratorship in the Department of Physiology at Cambridge, but he was not happy there.