Buxton, Patrick Alfred, 1892-

Patrick Alfred Buxton, born in 1892, was a Captain, RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corps), serving in Mesopotamia and Persia.

Epithet: CMG, entomologist

Patrick Alfred Buxton, born London, 1892, educated at home until the age of ten and was influenced by his father's family tradition (an old Quaker custom) of spare time nature study, less so by his mother's family's insistence on classical languages - she was a Jex-Blake, sister of the Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, and of the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

At Trinity College, Cambridge, Walter Fletcher encouraged Buxton's studies in the Natural Sciences Tripos. During the Great War he qualified in medicine at St George's, and then spent his time in the Royal Army Medical Corps collecting insects in Mesopotamia and Persia. During the 1920s he gradually equipped himself for his future role as an eminent medical entomologist, working in Cambridge, London and abroad. From 1923-1925 he led an expedition to Samoa, New Hebrides and the Western Pacific Islands.

In 1925 Buxton succeeded Col A Alcock as Director of the Department of Entomology in the new London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and became the Professor of Entomology in London University in 1933. With V B Wigglesworth he built up the study and teaching of insect physiology and medical entomology in the School. His studies of lice (The louse, 1939,1947) involved students, friends and family members as incubators and have become legendary. According to Wigglesworth his crowning achievement was The natural history of tsetse-flies, 1954.

Buxton did invaluable work on insecticides leading to the control of typhus in the war in Italy and elsewhere. Buxton wrote papers on many other zoological subjects and has several species of birds to his credit. He was elected a member of the Medical Research Council, President of the Royal Entomological Society and of the Linnean Society. In addition, he was a member of many other learned bodies. At the time of his death in 1955, he had had the longest service of any member of the active staff of the School.