Arthur Ransome, MD

11 February 1834 – 25 July 1922

Arthur Ransome was born in Manchester, the grandson of John Atkinson Ransome, F.R.C.S, surgeon to the Royal Infirmary, and the son of Joseph Atkinson Ransome, F.R.C.S, who held the same office in his turn. He qualified in 1855, having studied medicine both at Manchester and at Trinity College, Dublin. He then became an undergraduate of Caius College, Cambridge, and, in a distinguished career there, won the Caian and Mecklenburg scholarships and graduated as B.A, with first-class honours in natural sciences, in 1857, and as M.B, after further study at St. George’s Hospital and Paris, in 1858. In the latter year he began to practise as a physician in Bowdon and Manchester. He soon revealed a predominant interest in public health. In 1860 he initiated the weekly notification of new cases of certain diseases in Manchester and Salford, and he was a leading figure in the affairs of the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association. He became lecturer on hygiene at Owen’s College in 1874 and twenty years later was appointed to the chair of public health at Victoria University. He also received the appointment of physician to the Manchester Hospital for Consumption, and investigated especially the influence of living conditions on the spread of tuberculosis. His many papers on this subject were published under the title of A Campaign against Consumption in 1915. He was Milroy Lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians in 1890 and received the first Weber-Parkes Prize in 1897. He examined for Cambridge and Victoria Universities. Ransome retired to Bournemouth in 1895, but remained in touch with professional work as consulting physician to the Royal Victoria and West Hants Hospital. He married in 1862 Lucy Fullerton, by whom he had three sons and four daughters. He died at Bournemouth.