Ciren Scene Magazine - Establishing Local Connections
With Contributions from Members of Cirencester Civic Society Dr R Edgar Hope-Simpson OBE, MRCS, LRCP, FRCGP, FFPHM one of the outstanding general practitioner researchers of the 20th Century.
Snapshots of Local History
The latest plaque the Civic Society erected features Dr Edgar Hope-Simpson, one of the outstanding general practitioner researchers of the 20th Century. His widow Julia who still lives at 86 Dyer St was there. Sadly we can’t have a formal “unveiling” due to Covid19.
Edgar Hope-Simpson was born in Oxford in 1908 but spent most of his childhood in India where his father Sir John Hope-Simpson (a British diplomat) worked in the Indian civil service.
At the age of six he became a boarder with his elder brother at Gresham’s school in Norfolk where they both developed a love for natural history.
In 1925 he studied zoology and botany at Grenoble University and in 1932 he qualified as a physician from St. Thomas’s Hospital medical school in London.
He then moved to Dorset where he was house surgeon at Dorset County
ues as the Phoenix Surgery.
The research unit in Dyer Street was finally shut down in 1992.
Whilst running his own practice, eventually with a part- ner, Dr Guest, he also chaired an MRC working party which organised a major collaborative study in general practices around Britain.
His numerous publications (over 80) were scattered throughout the world’s most prodigious scientific journals and he travelled the world to lecture on his work.
His research unit in Cirencester be- came ‘the Mecca to which many of the World’s
Leading epidemiologists and virolo- gists made their pilgrimages’
Above: Dr Edgar Hope-Simpson in his later years and below, the plaque erected by Cirencester Civic Society in his honour.
Hospital for six months followed by work at Bridport hos- pital and general practice in Beaminster.
He was a much-loved doctor, famously visiting his pa- tients on horseback or skis if roads were impassable.
In 1945 Edgar moved to Cirencester and in 1946 took over a new practice in Dyer Street. where in 1947 the Medical Research Council allowed him to establish an ep- idemiological research unit to which was added a virus laboratory in 1961.
The GP practice eventually moved to Sheep Street in Cirencester and then to Chesterton Lane where it contin-
Dr Hope-Simpson was the World’s first epidemiologist to establish the connec- tion between shingles and chickenpox
which was the result of his painstaking observations amongst his patients in his practice. Chickenpox and shingles were known to be related but how? Experts at the time believed that two viruses existed but Edgar in- creasingly believed there was only one, but how to prove it?
In the end, he took his small team of research colleagues to the island of Yell in the Shetlands in 1953 and literally followed up every known case in a much-closed commu- nity. He was empowered by local islanders’ memories of occurrences and dates. By 1962, new microbiological techniques enabled him to prove his point.
He delivered his conclusion in the Albert Wander lecture of 1965,
His report became one of the most cited general practi- tioner publications.
‘This was world class research in clinical medicine and Dr Hope-Simpson made probably the most important clinical discovery in general practice in the 20th Century’
BMJ 2003
He was awarded numerous honours including the OBE in 1963 for his services to public health medicine, the Stuart prize from the BMA, the Kuenssberg prize from the Royal
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