Eric Bywaters

Eric George Lapthorne Bywaters (born June 1, 1910 in London , † April 2, 2003 in Beaconsfield ) was a British medic.

Bywaters graduated from Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1933 and then was assistant to pathologist Lionel Whitby . In 1937 he was invited by rheumatologist Walter Bauer to the Massachusetts General Hospital and did research on lupus erythematosus . At the beginning of the war in 1939 he returned to Great Britain, but was not accepted into the army due to kidney problems and instead took over rheumatology at the British Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith Hospital. During the bombing of London, he cleared the so-called Crush Syndrome , kidney failure in buried and wounded bomb victims after their release, which Bywater attributed to the release of myoglobin from injured muscle tissue into the bloodstream. He also found a treatment method in the form of intravenous or oral administration of alkaline fluids.

After the war, he established rheumatology as an independent discipline in Great Britain. From 1947 he was also director of a small clinical department for rheumatoid patients at a hospital of the Canadian Red Cross in Taplow near Maidenhead. Immediately after the discovery of the therapeutic effect of cortisone against rheumatic fever by Philip Showalter Hench and Edward Calvin Kendall, he undertook clinical tests which confirmed this (participation in a US-British study in 1948). As a preventive measure against rheumatic heart disease, cortisone proved to be a failure, but these were almost completely eliminated by the advance of antibiotics in the UK. Bywaters used his expertise as a pathologist to precisely characterize rheumatic diseases and developed new methods of treating chronic arthritis in children and adolescents.

In 1963 he received the Canada Gairdner International Award .

His hobbies were gardening and painting.

Web links

• Obituary in Rheumatology , Volume 42, 2003