Eric Sidebottom would sometimes find himself pressed by Oxford University Medical School to invigorate visiting doctors and their spouses with a tour of the city centre.
Foreign physicians, perhaps anticipating a brisk walk down The Broad, would be treated to a unique take on 900 years of Oxford history by a man with a passionate belief that world history has been more determined by disease than kings, politicians or wars.
Not only is Dr Sidebottom an authority on Oxford’s medical history, he was once taught by the most important figure in the discovery of penicillin, Howard Florey.
Never missing the opportunity to leave foreign visitors in no doubt that it was not Alexander Fleming but Florey’s team at Oxford University that really gave the world “the miracle drug,” the tours also reclaimed many of the city’s most beautiful buildings for science.
For instance there’s Magdalen College, the site of a hospital dating from 1189, dedicated to St John the Baptist; Radcliffe Camera, paid for with £40,000 bequeathed for a medical library by the 17th-century physician John Radcliffe; or what about Somerville, the college of Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin. And all this before we even reach the science area.
Now we all have the chance to walk in the footsteps of Florey, Robert Boyle (who formulated Boyle’s Law), Robert Hooke (inventor of the compound microscope) and a whole collection of Nobel Prize winners.
For Dr Sidebottom, a retired lecturer, has produced a new guidebook Oxford Medicine: A Walk Through Nine Centuries, which highlights some 50 sites of historic medical interest. It takes in 11 Oxford colleges, numerous science departments, libraries, private homes and city museums.
The problem was not finding enough buildings and plaques to fill the book, but deciding what to leave out. “The book can best be described as one man’s rather eclectic collection of fascinating places,” he said. “The selection of which individuals and colleges to include may be considered somewhat arbitrary. For example the decision to leave out the two colleges with which I have been involved, Corpus and Lincoln was a difficult one.
“I should perhaps confess to having exercised a certain amount of architectural licence, in that the medical associations of some of the buildings are rather tenuous, but it did seem invidious not to mention some of the more beautiful ones.”
Dr Sidebottom, 71, of Hayward Road, Oxford, studied medicine at Corpus and St Bartholomew’s in London, where he qualified in 1963. After junior posts at Barts he moved to Oxford to train in hospital pathology,but ended up as University Lecturer in Experimental Pathology in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology.
“I came to the Sir William Dunn school as a student 50 years ago. Florey was still here and I went to his lectures.” Being so close to the men who developed penicillin fuelled his fascination with the history of pathology, and he is keen to promote the importance of Norman Heatley, who died in 2004, the last surviving member of the team that in the early 1940s developed penicillin as a life- saving drug. Published versions of the penicillin story have continued to overemphasise the contribution of Alexander Fleming, seriously underplaying the Oxford work, particularly Heatley’s contribution. Over half a century, Dr Sidebottom has never tired of informing people that Fleming realised that the mould produced something that killed bacteria but then dropped it. “Fleming didn’t see the implications for treating human infection.”
For Dr Sidebottom, Oxford’s most glorious time was the 1600s when scientifically inclined scholars met at Wadham College and later established the Royal Society.
The story extends beyond Oxford’s golden heart. Important sites like the Hospital of St Bartholomew for lepers, founded by Henry I in the early 12th century are included, with this remarkable reminder of the city’s early medical past hidden at the top of a small lane off the Cowley Road.
He has unearthed a plaque at the back of the Westgate Centre to 13th-century Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, the man who became known as the “wonderful doctor”.
“It deserves a more prominent display,” says Dr Sidebottom. “It records the beginning of scientific study in Oxford in the 13th century.” It also serves as a reminder that a guide book on medicine in Oxford was well overdue.
* Oxford Medicine: A Walk Through Nine Centuries is published by Offox Press at £9.99.
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