John Burdon Sanderson

Sir John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, 1st Baronet, FRS,D.Sc. (21 December 1828 – 23 November 1905) was an English physiologist born near Newcastle upon Tyne, and a member of a well known Northumbrian family.

He received his medical education at the University of Edinburgh and at Paris. Settling in London, he became Medical Officer of Health for Paddington in 1856 and four years later physician to the Middlesex Hospital and the Brompton Consumption hospitals.

When diphtheria appeared in England in 1858 he was sent to investigate the disease at the different points of outbreak, and in subsequent years he carried out a number of similar inquiries, e.g. into the cattle plague and into cholera in 1866. In 1871, he reported that Penicillium inhibited the growth of bacteria, an observation which places him among the forerunners of Alexander Fleming. He became first principal of the Brown Institution at Lambeth in 1871, and in 1874 was appointed Jodrell Professor of Physiology at University College London, retaining that post until 1882. When the Waynflete Chair of Physiology was established at Oxford in 1882, he was chosen to be its first occupant, and immediately found himself the object of a furious anti-vivisectionist agitation. The proposal that the university should spend a large amount of money providing him with a suitable laboratory, lecture rooms, etc., in which to carry on his work, was strongly opposed, by some on grounds of economy, but largely because he was an upholder of the usefulness and necessity of experiments upon animals. It was, however, eventually carried by a small majority (88 to 85), and in the same year the Royal Society awarded him a Royal Medal in recognition of his researches into the electrical phenomena exhibited by plants and the relations of minute organisms to disease, and of the services he had rendered to physiology and pathology. In 1885 the University of Oxford was asked to vote £500 a year for three years for the purposes of the laboratory, then approaching completion. This proposal was fought with the utmost bitterness by Sanderson's opponents, the anti-vivisectionists including E. A. Freeman, John Ruskin and Bishop Mackarness of Oxford. Ultimately the money was granted by 412 to 244 votes.

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