John Crofton

Sir John Wenman Crofton (27 March 1912 – 3 November 2009) was a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis, who also spent the better part of his life raising awareness about the harmful effects of tobacco.

Crofton was born in Dublin, Ireland to a well-off Anglo-Irish family. His father was Dr. William Mervyn Crofton, who conducted medical research at the Royal University in Dublin, wrote books on endocrinology and virology, and had flourishing private medical practices both in Dublin and London. His mother was Mary Josephine Abbott, known as Molly. John was sent to prep school at Baymount, in the suburbs of Dublin away from the "troubles", and then in 1925 to Tonbridge School in Kent.

In 1930 he matriculated at Sidney Sussex College in the University of Cambridge, eventually earning an MB in 1937 and MD in 1947. During his studies he was a keen rock-climber, making frequent expeditions to the Scottish Highlands, and pioneering a number of climbs, one of which (the Cumming-Crofton route on Mitre Ridge in the Cairngorms) still bears his name. Like most Cambridge medical students, his clinical practice was in London, in his case at St Thomas's Hospital. During this time his family moved from Dublin to London and he lived with his parents for the first time since the age of nine.

His first medical posts, in 1937, were casual posts at military hospitals: the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich, and the Queen Alexandra's Military Hospital. In August 1939, while temporarily unemployed, he arranged a climbing trip in the French Alps with friends; they were in Italy when they discovered that war was about to break out, and managed to get back into France the day before the border closed, and from there on crowded trains back to England. He then signed up with the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in France, in Egypt with periods in Greece and Eritrea, and from 1942–1944 in Malta. He was then granted home leave and took up a posting in Northern Ireland, where he met his future wife, Eileen, also a qualified doctor. They married in December 1945, just three weeks after he suffered a broken nose in a car crash in Luneburg.

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