Early Life and Medical Education
Eliot Slater was born in Plumstead, London, on 28 August 1904. His father was Gilbert Slater, an economic historian who became Professor of Indian Economics at the University of Madras and later Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford. His mother, Violet Oakeshott, a Quaker and pacifist, was instrumental in sending him to Leighton Park School, Reading, from where he won an exhibition to St John's College, Cambridge, to study natural sciences in order to become a doctor. He gives a downbeat but amusing account of his education in his ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ (v. sub Sources). He went on to St. George’s Hospital, London, and qualified as a doctor in 1928. In 1931 he was appointed medical officer at the Maudsley Hospital, London, where he was encouraged by his chiefs Aubrey Lewis and Edward Mapother to apply statistical methods to the empirical study of mental illness.
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