Henry Barcroft

Henry Barcroft (18 October 1904 – 11 January 1998) was a British scientist and academic, who was Professor of Physiology at St Thomas' Hospital Medical School, London from 1948 to 1971. Early life and education Barcroft was born in Cambridge, and came from a distinguished Irish Quaker family: his father was Sir Joseph Barcroft, Professor of Physiology at Cambridge; and his mother, Mary "Minnie" Ball, was the daughter of Sir Robert Ball, one-time Royal Astronomer of Ireland who later became Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at Cambridge. Barcroft was educated at King's College School as a non-choral day boy, and later as a boarder at Marlborough College, where he won a Bethune Baker scholarship to study Botany, Zoology and Chemistry at King's College, Cambridge. Whilst at Cambridge he and his father jointly published two papers on blood circulation, and haemoglobin in invertebrates. He graduated in 1927 with first class honours in both parts of the Natural Sciences tripos, and then began his research work in physiology, his particular area of interest being the effect of intravenous adrenaline on aortic blood flow in dogs. He developed a new form of the stromuhr to measure the rate of blood flow at frequent intervals - an upgrade on the devices available at the time which could only take an average reading over a long period of time; he demonstrated this to the Physiological Society in January 1928. Failing to secure a Fellowship at Cambridge, Barcroft took up a Harmsworth Scholarship at St Mary's Hospital, London, where he obtained his MRCS and LRCP in 1932. Career In 1932 Barcroft joined the Department of Physiology at University College London (UCL) where he continued to work on blood flow in animals. In 1935, he was appointed Dunville Professor of Physiology at Queen's University, Belfast, where, in collaboration with Otto Edholm, he developed the techniques of venous occlusion plethysmography, a means of measuring blood flow in limbs. During the Second World War he and Edholm carried out research on the effects of haemorrhage at the British Postgraduate Medical School in Hammersmith, London.