Alfred William Alcock

Alfred William Alcock, CIE (23 June 1859 in Bombay – 24 March 1933 in Belvedere, Kent) was a British physician, naturalist, and carcinologist.

Alcock was the son of a sea-captain, John Alcock in Bombay, India who retired to live in Blackheath. His mother was a daughter of Christopher Puddicombe, the only son of a Devon squire.

Alcock studied at Mill Hill School, at Blackheath Proprietary School and at Westminster School. In 1876 his father faced financial losses and he was taken out of school and sent to India in the Wynaad district. Here he was taken care of by relatives engaged in coffee-planting. As a boy of 17 he spent time in the jungles of Malabar.

Coffee-planting in Wynaad declined and Alcock obtained a post a commission agent's office in Calcutta. This office closed soon and he worked from 1878-1880 in Purulia as an agent recruiting unskilled labourers for the Assam tea gardens. While here an acquaintance, Duncan Cameron, left him a Macmillan book by Michael Foster Physiology Primer. This book, he wrote in his autobiographical notes, That little book was to me what the light from heaven was to St. Paul. It set my face towards natural science. He regretted that he never got to know Michael Foster, but throughout the rest of my life I have thought of him with the gratitude of a disciple, for his Primer and for his Textbook of Physiology which I got as soon as I had mastered his Primer. Its philosophical spirit impressed me very deeply.

Another friend he made in Purulia was Lieut.-Col. J. J. Wood, then Deputy Sanitary Commissioner there. Wood invited him to the study of botany, natural history and chemistry. During this time Alcock even dug graves to study the bodies of humans. He studied bones using Holden's Osteology - Thence I crept on by means of a Nicholson's ' Manual of Zoology ' to the ' Descent of Man ' and the ' Origin of Species.' I was now resolved to be a doctor, but I could not think how it was to come to pass.

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