When I use a word . . . Medical blue plaques in London

“Residencies of deceased celebrities”

On 17 July 1863 Mr William Ewart, MP for Dumfries Burghs, rose in the House of Commons to ask a question of Mr William Cowper, MP for Hertford and first commissioner of public works,1 whether it might be practicable “through the agency of the Metropolitan Board of Works, or otherwise, ... to have inscribed on those houses in London which have been inhabited by celebrated persons, the names of such persons.” He gave some examples of “places which had been the residences of the ornaments of their history [that] could not but be precious to all thinking Englishmen,” and he thought that “the House ... would agree with him that it was desirable some record should be placed upon the respective localities.” He gave examples. “Milton lived in a garden-house in Petty France, now No. 19, York Street, Westminster; Newton's house in St. Martin's Street, south side of Leicester Square, was now an hotel; Dryden died at No. 43, Gerard Street; [Matthew] Prior lived in Duke Street, Westminster; Sir Joshua Reynolds lived in the centre of the west side of Leicester Square; Hogarth lived in part of the Sablonièrre hotel; [John] Flaxman at 7, Buckingham Street, Fitzroy Square—his studio was still there; Dr. Johnson died at 8, Bolt Court, Fleet Street; Goldsmith at 2, Brick Court, Temple; Gibbon at No. 7, Bentinck Street; Garrick at the centre house, Adelphi Terrace; the great Duke of Marlborough died in Marlborough House; Lord Somers's house was still in Lincoln's Inn Fields; Lord Mansfield lived in King's Bench Walk; Samuel Rogers lived in St. James's Place, and Lord Macaulay in the Albany.”

Mr Cowper replied that he foresaw some difficulties. For example, “Some persons liked to put their own names on a brass plate upon their doors, and might not wish to have the name of an eminent departed person also there. Some owners, too, might object to having the antiquity of their houses so prominently revealed, especially if they were thinking of selling them.” However, “If those difficulties could be got over, it would, no doubt, be gratifying to the public to be able to identify the houses in which such men as Newton and Reynolds had lived.”

The following week, on 24 July, the Journal of the Society of Arts published a letter from Henry Cole, the British inventor, later credited with the idea of sending Christmas cards. Cole supported the idea and added the names of Stephenson, Brunel, and Locke.2 He suggested that any such initiatives should be voluntary and that, rather than calling on the Metropolitan Board of Works or some parochial authority, the society could get involved, and “having communicated with the owner or occupier of the premises, and, having obtained his concurrence, might, from its own funds, provide the necessary tablet.”

A week later, the society published another letter, from the artist John Leighton, who suggested that such a scheme would be better put into the hands of the Board of Trade, although he then poured cold water on his own suggestion, by pointing out that on one occasion, when a group of artists had raised funds to have a plaque set up on a house in Covent Garden, in memory of the artist J M W Turner, and had asked the Board of Trade for permission, it had been denied.3

A few years later the Society of Arts started to commission what came to be known as blue plaques. The first were put up in London in 1867, to Lord Byron in Cavendish Square, on a building that has since been destroyed, and to Napoleon III, in King Street, Westminster, which survives. Although the latter is a round blue plaque, most of the 35 plaques that the society put up during the next 35 years were coloured brown, for example those to Edmund Burke (1876), John Keats (1896), and W M Thackeray (1887). Not all were circular, but those that were were decorated on the rim with the name of the society, but intertwined with such an intricate curlicue design that the name could hardly be read. Furthermore, the society’s journal contained no announcements about the plaques, as far as I can discover. Was the society reticent about declaring its association with the plaques?

In 1901, the London County Council took over the scheme and replaced the design on the rim with a laurel wreath featuring, at the top in large letters, “LCC.” No reticence there. The shapes and colours used still varied, but blue was finally settled on in 1921 and in 1938 the familiar modern design was adopted, with omission of the decorative rim.

When the LCC was replaced by the Greater London Council in 1965, the scheme was continued, and in 1986, after the abolition of the GLC, English Heritage took over responsibility. Its website contains extensive information about the scheme.4

William Ewart shares a blue plaque with the actor John Beard at the Hampton Branch Library in Richmond upon Thames and has his own at 16 Eaton Place, Belgravia.

Celebrated medical men

Most of the plaques on the one-time “residences of celebrated men” are devoted to politicians, painters, poets, playwrights, and other writers, but some London medical men have crept in. They include:

● Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), physician to George II, benefactor of the British Museum, creator of the Chelsea Physic Garden, and 13th president of the Royal Society. He lived at 4 Bloomsbury Place, WC1A, from 1695 to 1742.

● William Hunter (1718–83), anatomist, who lived in Windmill Street in Soho, where he also kept a museum. His house is now part of the Lyric Theatre.

● John Hunter (1728–93), John Hunter’s younger brother, a surgeon who lived at 31 Golden Square, Mayfair. He founded the museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London and the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow University was named after him.

● Richard Bright (1789–1858), who lived at 11 Saville Row from 1830 to 1858. Some have suggested that Charles II had Bright’s disease,5 an eponym that was first used in The Lancet in 1830, soon after Bright’s description in Reports of Medical Cases (1827–31). However, I think it was more likely to have been gouty nephropathy, the King’s death having been hastened by the ministrations of his physicians, with iatrogenic dehydration secondary to bleeding and cupping, scarifying, blistering and clystering, and the administration of purgative and emetic medicines.6

● William Marsden (1796–1897), a surgeon, who founded the Royal Free and Royal Marsden Hospitals and who lived at 65 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

● Thomas Hodgkin (1798–1866), who lived at 35 Bedford Square while working at Guy’s Hospital. He described seven cases of what we now call Hodgkin’s disease in 1832, in a paper titled “On some morbid appearances of the absorbent glands and spleen.” It was first called “Hodgkin's disease” by Samuel Wilks in 1865, in a paper in Guy's Hospital Reports. Wilks does not have a blue plaque.

● Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who lived at 110 Gower Street, WC1, from 1838 to 1842.

● Lord Joseph Lister (1827–1912), a surgeon and bacteriologist, who introduced antisepsis into surgical practice, and who lived at 12 Park Crescent, Mayfair.

● Sir James Mackenzie (1853–1925), Scottish-born general practitioner, who studied cardiac arrhythmias using his own invention, a polygraph, and demonstrated the use of digitalis in atrial fibrillation. His plaque was put up by the College of General Practitioners at 17 Bentinck Street, W1, where he lived and worked from 1907 to 1911.

● Sir Ronald Ross (1857–1932), the first British recipient of a Nobel prize, in 1902, for his work on the transmission of malaria by mosquitos. He lived at 18 Cavendish Square in Marylebone.

● Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), author of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1898–1928), who lived at Canterbury Crescent in Stockwell.

● Sir George Frederick Still (1868–1941), paediatrician, who lived at 28 Queen Anne Street, W1. He described Still's disease in his doctoral dissertation in Cambridge in 1896 and the eponym was first used in The Lancet in 1905.

● Sir Henry Hallett Dale (1875–1968), pharmacologist and physiologist, who won the Nobel prize in 1930 for his work on the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. He lived at Mount Vernon House in Hampstead from 1919 to 1942.

● Cecil Belfield-Clarke (1894–1970), a general practitioner, inventor of Clarke’s Rule, and a founding member of the League of Coloured Peoples. His plaque is situated near the site of his practice near the Elephant and Castle and was put up by the Nubian Jak Community Trust in 2023.7

Celebrated medical women

Only about 15% of all English Heritage’s plaques are dedicated to women, an imbalance that the society started to remedy in 2016, and earlier this year it was announced that for the first time in 2024 blue plaques dedicated to women will outnumber those dedicated to men. They include Diana Jean Kinloch Beck (1900–1956),8 the first female English neurosurgeon, who established a neurosurgical unit at the Middlesex Hospital.

Here are some medical women who have been honoured with blue plaques:

● Mary Seacole (1805–1881), Jamaican-born nurse, who tended soldiers during the Crimean war, despite rejection by the British Army of her offer to serve. She lived at 157 George Street, Marylebone.

● Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), who lived at 10 South Street, Mayfair and died there.

● Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain, by sitting the examination of the Society of Apothecaries, which awarded her its licence in 1865.9 In 1866 she established the St Mary's Dispensary for Women and Children in Marylebone and her plaque is at 20 Upper Berkeley Street. Her colleague, Sophia Jex-Blake, the first practising female doctor in Scotland, also deserves a plaque.

● Rachel McMillan (1859–1931), health visitor, and her sister Margaret McMillan (1860–1931), pioneers of nursery education, who lived in Creek Road, Deptford.

● Edith Louisa Cavell (1865–1915), nurse, who treated wounded soldiers from both sides during the first world war and was executed by the German government. Her English Heritage plaque is on the London Hospital, where she trained and worked from 1896 to 1901. She also has plaques on the erstwhile Shoreditch Infirmary in Kingsland Road, N1, in West Runton, Norfolk, and at 1 Elton Road in Clevedon, North Somerset.

● Hannah Billig (1901–87), “The Angel of Cable Street,” who worked in the East End of London and tended the sick and injured in underground shelters during the blitz, despite herself being injured, and was awarded the George Medal. She lived and worked at 198 Cable Street, E1. Her blue plaque is not one that English Heritage put up.

Nominations wanted

English Heritage seeks nominations of individuals who would be worthy of a blue plaque. However, before you nominate someone you know, perhaps a spouse, or even yourself, take note of an important criterion governing the choice of those who are so honoured: they must not only have been eminent, they must also have been dead for at least 20 years.