Barlow, Helen Alice Dorothy, 1887-1975

Thomas Barlow was born on 4 September 1845 at Brantwood Fold, Edgworth, near Bolton, Lancashire, the eldest son of James Barlow (1821-1887), mill-owner, and his wife Alice n?e Barnes (d. 1888). He attended local schools and in 1863 went to Owen's College Manchester to read natural science, graduating BSc. (London) in 1867. He went up to University College London to study medicine in 1868, and on qualifying in 1870 was appointed house physician to Sir William Jenner at University College Hospital. He was awarded his MB and BS in November 1873 (MD 1874). In April 1874 he was appointed medical registrar at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, which was to be the principal locus of Barlow's research activities. He later served successively as assistant physician and full physician at Great Ormond Street until 1899. He also held the posts of assistant physician at Charing Cross Hospital (1875 -77) and at the London Hospital (1877-80), and assistant physician and later full physician at University College Hospital from 1880 to 1910. From 1895 to 1907 Barlow held the Holme chair of clinical medicine.

Barlow made his name as a specialist in childhood diseases in the 1870s and '80s; he is above all associated with the isolation of infantile scurvy - so-called 'Barlow's disease' - as a disease distinct from rickets, with which it was routinely confused prior to the 1880s. In 1883 he published his first findings on infantile scurvy in a paper entitled 'On cases described as "acute rickets" ... the scurvy being an essential and the rickets a variable element', in Medico-Chirurgical Transactions ,1883, 66: 199-220. He greatly expanded the number of cases investigated for his Bradshaw lecture of 1894, entitled 'Infantile scurvy and its relation to rickets'. Barlow also made significant research contributions in the areas of meningitis and rheumatic illness in children. Later he turned his attention to neurological illnesses such as Raynaud's disease and erythromelalgia.

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