Up for auction "Oxygenation of Blood" Joseph Barcroft Hand Signed 3X5 Card. This item is authenticated By Todd
Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity. ES-2369 Sir Joseph Barcroft CBE FRS(26
July 1872 – 21 March 1947) was a British physiologist best
known for his studies of the oxygenation of blood. Born
in Newry, County Down into
a Quaker family,
he was the son of Henry Barcroft DL and
Anna Richardson Malcomson of The Glen, Newry – a property purchased
for his parents by his mother's uncle, John Grubb Richardson and adjoining his
own estate in Bessbrook. He was initially educated at Bootham School, York and later
at The Leys School, Cambridge. He married Mary
Agnetta Ball, daughter of Sir Robert S. Ball, in 1903. He received his degree
in Medicine and Science in 1896 from Cambridge University, and immediately began his
studies of haemoglobin. In May 1910 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and would
be awarded their Royal Medal in 1922 and their Copley medal in
1943. He would also deliver their Croonian Lecture in
1935. In both the First World War and Second World War he
had the prestigious role of Chief Physiologist at the Gas Warfare Centre
at Porton Down near Salisbury. In
1936 he was nominated, unsuccessfully, by Professor Arthur Dighton Stammers,
Professor of Physiology in the University of the Witwatersrand, for
the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine, for his work on the respiratory function of the blood
and the functions of the spleen. In the course of his research,
he did not hesitate to use himself as a test subject. For example, during
the First World War,
when he was called to Royal Engineers Experimental Station (near Salisbury)
to carry out experiments on asphyxiating gas,
he exposed himself to an atmosphere of poisonous hydrogen cyanide.
On another occasion he remained for seven days in a glass chamber in order to
calculate the minimum quantity of oxygen required for the survival of the human
organism, and another time he exposed himself to such a low temperature that he
collapsed into unconsciousness. He also studied the physiology of oxygenation
at extreme altitudes, and for this purpose he organized expeditions to the peak
of Tenerife (1910),
to Monte Rosa (1911),
and to the Peruvian Andes (1922).
Between 1902 and 1905 he was a Governor of Leighton Park School, the Quaker School in Reading.
From 1925 to 1937 he held the chair of physiology at Cambridge. His final
research, begun in 1933, concerned fetal respiration. He was knighted in 1935. He was
elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in
1938. During the first years of the Second World War he
was again summoned to Porton Down to consult on chemical weapons.
He died in Cambridge in 1947. |