Edward Lowbury

Edward Joseph Lister Lowbury (December 12, 1913 - July 10, 2007) was a pioneering and innovative English medical bacteriologist and pathologist, and also a published poet.

Edward Lowbury was born in Hampstead to the recently naturalised Benjamin William Loewenberg (of Latvian-Jewish background) and the Brazilian-born Alice Sarah Hallé (of German-Jewish origin) in 1913. The family name was anglicised to Lowbury at the start of World War 1. His father was a medical doctor and Edward’s middle names were chosen in honour of the surgeon Joseph Lister who had done so much to reduce post-operative infection. His son was to follow closely in Lister’s footsteps in the medical career that he eventually chose.

Lowbury’s secondary education was as a foundation scholar at St Paul’s School (London), where he began to specialise in science. He was also twice winner of the school’s Milton Prize – the first time for a sequence of 40 sonnets. Having won a science scholarship to University College, Oxford, he continued to take an interest in writing, gaining the 1934 Newdigate Prize and the 1937 Matthew Arnold Memorial essay prize.

His initial medical training was at the Royal London Hospital. He was called up to the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1943, where he specialised in pathology and was posted to Kenya. There he was one of the editors of the wartime literary magazine Equator. While still in service, his collection Crossing the Line was given first prize in a competition judged by Louis MacNeice and accepted for publication. On leaving the army, he took employment with the Common Cold Research Unit with James Lovelock as one of his colleagues. Those days are remembered in the last of Lowbury’s “Apocryphal Letters”: Gaia – a letter to James Lovelock.

In 1949 Lowbury was appointed head of the microbiology department at the Medical Research Council burns unit of Birmingham Accident Hospital and also taught pathology as a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham Medical School. As founder of the Hospital Infection Research Laboratory at what is now known as City Hospital, Birmingham in 1964, he emerged as one of the foremost researchers in hospital infection, particularly in the prevention of burns infection, the problems of antibiotic resistance and skin disinfection and lectured on his specialities throughout the world before retiring in 1979 and being awarded an OBE.

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