Harold Percival Himsworth

Sir Harold Percival Himsworth KCB FRS (born  May 19, 1905 in Huddersfield , †  November 1, 1993 in London ) was a British internist and diabetologist . He worked from 1939 to 1949 as chief physician of the internal medicine ward and as professor of medicine at University College London and from 1949 to 1968 as secretary of the Medical Research Council .

Among other things, he was responsible for the differentiation of diabetes mellitus into the forms of type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes, which are defined by various characteristics. For his scientific achievements, he was admitted to the Royal Society in 1955 and, two years later, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , among other honors .

Life

Harold Percival Himsworth was born in Huddersfield in 1905 and began studying medicine at University College London in 1924 , where the neurosurgeon Wilfred Trotter was one of his academic teachers. He completed his studies in 1929 with honors in three of four subjects in the final examination and received a gold medal from the university two years later in recognition of his degree and his doctorate . From 1930 he worked as an assistant doctor in the internal medicine department of the University College Hospital. From 1936 he worked as deputy chief physician and from 1939 to 1949 as chief physician of the ward and as professor of medicine.

In 1946/1947 he served as President of the Experimental Medicine Section of the Royal Society of Medicine . He became a member of the Medical Research Council in 1948 and was the first clinician to serve as MRC Secretary from 1949 to 1968 and Vice Chairman of the MRC in 1967/1968. As part of his many years of service at the MRC, he was largely responsible for the establishment of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology , one of the world's leading research institutes in the field of molecular biology , whose employees have been awarded seven Nobel prizes while Harold Percival Himsworth was in charge of the MRC . In 1968 he retired. He then served from 1969 to 1976 as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine .

Harold Percival Himsworth was married from 1932 until his wife's death in 1988 and was the father of two sons. He died in London in 1993 .

Scientific work

The main focus of the scientific work of Harold Percival Himsworth was the etiology of diabetes mellitus and diseases of the liver .

In the area of ​​diabetes research, he examined, among other things, the influence of insulin on the carbohydrate metabolism of diabetics and healthy people in order to characterize the connection between glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity. As part of this work, he developed a test to measure insulin sensitivity, with which he was able to differentiate between two different forms of the disease in diabetes patients. He found that insulin-sensitive diabetics showed a tendency to develop ketoacidosis and had an absolute deficiency in the body's own insulin, while insulin-insensitive diabetics reacted inappropriately to their own body's insulin.

This observation, which formed the basis for the distinction between type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes, which has been established to this day, he presented for the first time in 1939 in a series of three lectures entitled "Mechanism of Diabetes mellitus" in Part of the Goulstonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians . He also pointed to the younger age and the acute manifestation of the disease in insulin-sensitive diabetics, as well as the connection between insulin-insensitive diabetes and obesity , high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis .

With the beginning of the Second World War he turned to research into the causes of acute and chronic liver failure , the frequent occurrence of which among workers in ammunition factories as a result of exposure to the explosive trinitrotoluene had been known since the First World War . In the following years he also devoted himself to other diseases of the liver and examined not only liver cirrhosis as the end-stage of chronic liver diseases, but also the initial events that led to damage to the hepatocytes .

Awards

Harold Percival Himsworth was elected a Fellow of the University College London in 1936 , in 1952 he was accepted as Knight Commander in the Order of the Bath (KCB) and three years later he was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). He has also been made a Fellow by the Royal Colleges of British Radiologists , Internists , Surgeons and Pathologists .

He also received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Toulouse (1950), Glasgow (1953), London (1956), Manchester (1956), Wales (1959), Cambridge (1964), Leeds (1968) and the University of the West Indies (1964) ). The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1957), the American Philosophical Society (1972), the Royal Society of Science and Education in Gothenburg (1957) and the Royal Belgian Academy of Medicine (1958) appointed him as theirs, as did various foreign medical associations external member or honorary member.

Works (selection)

• The Goulstonian Lectures on the Mechanism of Diabetes Mellitus. London 1939 (special print from The Lancet )
• The Liver and its Diseases. Oxford 1947, second edition 1950 (Spanish edition 1949, Italian edition 1950)
• The Development and Organization of Scientific Knowledge. London 1970
• Scientific Knowledge and Philosophic Thought. Baltimore and London 1986

literature

• Douglas Black, John Gray: Sir Harold Percival Himsworth, KCB 19 May 1905-1 November 1993. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 41/1995. The Royal Society, pp. 201-218, ISSN  0080-4606
• John Gray: Obituary: Sir Harold Himsworth In: The Independent . Issued November 9, 1993

Web links

• Richard Himsworth: Key Figures in the History of Diabetes: Sir Harold Himsworth MD FRS (1905-1993) . In: Diabetologia . 48 (3 )/2005. Title page and biography (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member History: Sir Harold Himsworth. American Philosophical Society, accessed September 30, 2018 .