James Hamilton Doggart

Dr. James Hamilton Doggart (22 January 1900 – 15 October 1989) was a leading ophthalmologist, [1] lecturer, writer, cricketer,[2] and a member of the Cambridge Apostles [3] and the Bloomsbury Group.

Doggart was born exactly one year before the death of Queen Victoria. Remembering his childhood, he wrote:

Motor cars were rare, slow and often out of action, so that we had plenty of scope for spinning-tops, games with marbles and cherry-stones, tipcat, and a bowler and hoop… Riding on a milk cart was a special treat. One stood up beside the driver, behind those jangling, swinging cans, out of which the driver would ladle measures of milk. (Reflections in a Family Mirror, Red House, 2002) [4]

Doggart's first year at King's College, Cambridge was spent in the shadow of war, helped him to learn that lesson. When he went up to read medicine at King's in 1917, many of the young men who would have become his friends were dying in the trenches. Most of the dons who would have taught him were in Whitehall. There were only ten undergraduates at King's that year, including a seriously wounded soldier, two choral scholars, and two visiting students from India and China. [5]

He filled the grim emptiness by throwing himself into his medical studies. He sailed through chemistry, physics, biology, anatomy and physiology, and finished two years of medical studies in one. In May 1918, he persuaded the Admiralty to accept him as a surgeon-probationer and began his first job in medicine, as an anaesthetist. There were no antibiotics or blood transfusions. The only anaesthetics available were chloroform and ether. His notes from the period express particular distress at wounds involving the knee-joint, and the regularity of gangrene-induced amputations. [6]

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