Edward Headlam Greenhow

Edward Headlam Greenhow (1814 – 22 April 1888) was an English physician, epidemiologist, sanitarian, statistician, clinician and lecturer. He was arguably the first "Green", a century before the term was invented.

Greenhow was born at North Shields in 1814, and after receiving his medical education at Edinburgh and Montpelier, he joined his father in practice in that town. His grandfather, father and uncle were all physicians. Here he practiced for eighteen years, and did much useful work in sanitation, becoming a member of the Town Council of Tynemouth and chairman of the Board of Health.

In 1852 he graduated as M.D. at King's College, University of Aberdeen, and in 1853 established himself in London as a consulting physician. For some years he was largely engaged in work connected with public health, being appointed lecturer on this subject at St. Thomas's Hospital (the first appointment of the kind in the country). Across the road from St. Thomas's Hospital is Guy's Hospital, which had been run by the legendary Sir Astley Cooper. Greenhow became acquainted with Thomas Addison, and saw the patients mentioned in Addison's book before they died. He also met William Withey Gull, who with William Baly ran the Cholera Committee. Dr. Gull later became Queen Victoria's physician.

An elaborate inquiry he personally undertook into the excessive mortality from certain diseases in certain districts in England, for the purpose of his lectures, was published as a parliamentary paper by Mr. Simon, later Sir John Simon, then medical officer of the Board of Health. The facts gathered in this inquiry were made the basis of much of the future work arising out of the Public Health Act, 1858, when Mr. Simon was medical officer to the Privy Council. Greenhow was engaged to undertake inquiries into diphtheria (1859) and pulmonary disease among operatives (miners, grinders, flax-dressers, etc.), his report on this latter subject (1860–1861) being of great value and of wide interest. Professor Burdon Sanderson said of Sir John Simon that "he endured, perhaps with too little patience, the constant pinpricks of official interference". Indeed, after he had been overruled too often, Sir John resigned in 1876 as Chief Medical Officer to the Privy Council—and the post was promptly abolished. Greenhow had lost a valuable ally. The point of contention was that Simon and Greenhow were persuaded that cleanliness led to health, and that pollution, such as in Liverpool, was the cause of the plagues of typhoid and Asiatic cholera in Britain. Accordingly, the government used William Henry Duncan to refute the conclusions of Greenhow, with the glib argument that Greenhow was "statistically inaccurate". L.J. Donaldson continued the slander even in his "Duncan Lecture" of 1998. The simple clarity and transparency of Greenhow's arithmetic, however, allowed of no mistake. The government was busy with the Indian Rebellion and with the Opium Wars, and simply did not wish to spend the money on a clean-up.

In 1855, Baly and Gull issued a report that a lady living about six miles from the Britannia Pump in Soho, and her maid, had died of cholera in Hampstead. Nobody else had died of cholera in Hampstead. The lady had sent her maid to fetch the water, and told neighbours that she enjoyed its flavour. Irresponsible elements in the government ignored the conclusion of the Cholera Committee, and then unexpectedly had a change of plan. They despatched John Snow to tell the local authority to disconnect the pump. The Soho epidemic stopped abruptly, and slowly a policy of public works began, by which sewers were fitted to separate the drinking water from the sewage.

Greenhow's various reports as Medical Officer of the Privy Council were instrumental in the emancipation of children, beginning in 1867 with a change to the Workshop Regulation Act. This made it illegal to employ children under the age of eight.

In 1859 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and in 1861 was elected assistant physician to the Middlesex Hospital and lecturer on the subjects of public health and medical jurisprudence in the medical school. In 1871 he became physician and lecturer on medicine ; he did good service to the hospital and its school during his whole connection with them, and on his retirement from the acting staff in 1880 was elected consulting physician to the hospital.

Greenhow was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1870) and a member of many medical societies, to which he largely contributed. In 1879–1881 he was president of the Clinical Society of London, which he had taken a great share in founding in 1867. He was the author of works on diphtheria, chronic bronchitis, and upon Addison's disease, the latter subject being selected by him for his Croonian lectures, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians in 1875. The lectures became the subject of a second book on Addison's disease, and Greenhow delivered the lecture on Addison's disease at the International Medical Congress of 1881. In this he was well-placed, having had eleven patients of his own—the largest number ever recorded for a single clinician. He had pioneered treatment with iron and effervescing medicine which engineered a "remission", and so prolonged life.

As a practical physician and clinical teacher, and as one of the earliest workers in sanitary science, Greenhow's name will be remembered, while the fruits of his industrious and busy life are recorded in the medical literature. It should further be added that he served on more than one Royal Commission, of which Lord Kimberley (Earl of Kimberley) was chairman ; while he had been the medical officer to the Pensions Commutation Board from its formation in 1870 until the day of his death.

He was returning to his home at Reigate on the afternoon of the 22nd April 1888., after attending to his duties as medical officer to the Pensions Commutation Board, when, while at Charing Cross Station, he died suddenly. He had married, in 1842, the widow of Mr. W. Barnard, by whom he had one son, the Rev. E. Greenhow, vicar of Earsdon. She died in 1857, and in 1862 he married the second daughter of Mr. Joseph Hume, M.P., by whom he had two daughters.