William Kitchen Parker
William Kitchen Parker (born June 23, 1823 in Dogthorpe near Peterborough , † July 3, 1890 in Cardiff ) was a British zoologist and anatomist . He was a Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons of England .
Parker was the son of a little farmer and Methodist and went to the local village school and for a short time to the grammar school in Peterborough . At the age of 15 he apprenticed as a pharmacist in Stamford and three years later he was apprenticed to a doctor and surgeon at Market Overton . As a teenager he was interested in bird watching and acquired a good knowledge of botany and anatomy through private training and dissection of animals during his training. From 1844 to 1846 he studied at King's College London and completed his training in 1846/47 at Charing Cross Hospital with the LSA (license from the Pharmacists' Society of London, then the usual medical degree in London). In 1849 he opened a practice in Pimlico and married Elizabeth Jeffery (died 1890), with whom he had four sons and three daughters. Because of his scientific achievements, he received a grant from the Royal Society , whose Fellow he became in 1865 and whose Royal Medal he received in 1866. In 1873 he became professor of comparative anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons, first in support of William Henry Flower, who had failed due to illness . After that they were both professors there. To this end, he first became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1883 he gave up his practice and received a state pension from 1889. He died soon after his wife's death, which hit him badly while visiting his son in Cardiff, and is buried in Wandsworth .
He is best known for his studies of the comparative anatomy of the vertebrate skeleton. He attracted particular attention through the refutation of a theory of the formation of bones by Robert Owen , who still followed an idealistic school which, like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, assumed a prototype of vertebrate bones. This had already been criticized in 1858 by Thomas Henry Huxley (who was a great role model for Parker, who named his son after him) in his Croonian Lecture before the Royal Society on the basis of embryological observations. Parker went on to do this, specifically studying the development of the vertebrate skull and shoulder bones starting with fish.
He was also an expert on foraminifera and studied the flight apparatus of birds (and Archeopteryx ).
His son Thomas Jeffery Parker became Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Otago in New Zealand and his son William Newton Parker Professor of Biology at University College Cardiff. Another son was a draftsman and lithographer and the fourth doctor.
From 1871 to 1873 he was President of the Royal Microscopical Society . In 1885 he received the Baly Medal from the Royal College of Physicians. In 1864 he became an honorary fellow of the Zoological Society.
Fonts
- with William Benjamin Carpenter , Thomas Rupert Jones : Introduction to the study of Foraminifera. Ray Society, London 1862
- with GT Bettany: The morphology of the skull. London 1872 (Compiled by Bettany from Parker's Treatises)
- A monograph on the structure and development of the shoulder-girdle and sternum in the vertebrates. Ray Society, London 1868
Web links
- Obituary in Nature, 42, 1890, pp. 297-299, online
- Entry in Dictionary of National Biography, wikisource
References and comments
- ↑ In 1861 he had unsuccessfully applied for the post of curator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, the post received instead Flower.
- ↑ Membership in Great Britain was considered a high qualification for medical professionals. In Parker's case, the usual exams were only pro forma.
- ↑ Parker suffered from writing difficulties
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Parker, William Kitchen |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British zoologist and anatomist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 23, 1823 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dogthorpe |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 3, 1890 |
| Place of death | Cardiff |