Thomas Hodgkin’s medical career was thwarted but his name lives on in a disease named after him

Thomas Hodgkin has a disease named after him but in his day he found it hard to get recognition from the medical establishment

Guy's Hospital, London, in the mid 19th century where physician Thomas Hodgkin once worked. Picture: Wellcome Library

RESPECTED physician Thomas Hodgkin was a shining light of Guy’s Hospital in London. His work in the field of anatomical pathology and collection of medical samples for teaching at the hospital made him popular among the doctors and students.

Hodgkin had been working at the hospital for more than 10 years when in 1837 he applied for a clinical appointment. However, he held some progressive views: a deep concern for the poor, enslaved and indigenous people, and he supported the establishment of the University College in London. Some of these ideas didn’t sit well with the autocratic hospital administrator Benjamin Harrison, particularly his support of the new college, which Harrison saw as a rival to Guy’s medical school. So Harrison appointed Benjamin Babington.

Hodgkin quit his position, ending his academic medical career. But it was not the end of his career as a physician; he would become the personal doctor to philanthropist Moses Montefiore, travelling widely and helping with a range of causes in which Montefiore was involved.

Undated 19th century portrait of physician Thomas Hodgkin. Public domain

Hodgkin would also not be forgotten. His 1832 paper — On Some Morbid Appearances of the Absorbent Glands and Spleen — about a disease that enlarged the lymph nodes was cited by Dr Samuel Wilks in 1865 in a paper that named the condition “Hodgkin’s disease”, immortalising the physician.

Hodgkin was born 220 years ago today, on August 17, 1798, into a strict Quaker family. At 18 he became a personal assistant to an apothecary — then considered a pathway to becoming a doctor of medicine for people of modest means. At 21 Hodgkin received an inheritance that made it possible for him to secure a spot as a student at a London hospital school.

In 1819 he began “walking the wards” (doing rounds) at Guy’s Hospital in London, which was founded in the 18th century by Thomas Guy for incurable cases. In 1820 Hodgkin studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. During his vacations he travelled overseas, often visiting hospitals to see the latest medical developments, including the stethoscope.

Graduating in 1823, one of his first patients was a banker who introduced him to another banker, Abraham Montefiore, and he became his personal physician. Although that position was terminated, Hodgkin became friends with Abraham’s brother, wealthy philanthropist Moses Montefiore.

After spending more time in Europe, he returned to take up a volunteer position at Guy’s in 1825, which led to his appointment as the hospital’s first lecturer in morbid anatomy and curator of its museum.

But just as his career seemed to be moving forward he had a personal setback. He fell in love with Sarah Godlee, his cousin, but marriage to a cousin was forbidden by the Quakers. In 1828 Sarah married someone else.

Heartbroken, Hodgkin threw himself into his work. He made important contributions to pathology, conducted dozens of autopsies describing the appearance of various diseases, including the one later named after him.

He was also passionate about causes such as the abolition of slavery and improving conditions for the poor to help prevent tragedies such as the 1832 cholera epidemic. However, his views were not always shared by the conservative hospital staff.

Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, by Henry Weigall painted in the 19th century. Public domain

Photograph of Thomas Hodgkin. Picture: Wellcome Library

When he was offered a fellowship at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1836, he refused because the college had recently relaxed its bylaw that members had to be selected from Oxford or Cambridge which would make him the first outsider. That refusal may have been why Harrison passed him over for a position at the hospital in 1837. Hodgkin quit as lecturer and curator, and sank into depression. In 1842 he tried another lecturing position at St Thomas’s hospital, but soon left because he had problems dealing with other staff.

Instead he occupied himself lecturing on hygiene to the poor and joining the Aborigines Protection Society, which concerned itself with indigenous people worldwide, including in Australia.

Then in 1850, after years of being a bachelor, Hodgkin finally married, to non-Quaker widow Sarah Scaife.

When his friend Moses Montefiore’s wife died in 1862, Hodgkin kept a promise to accompany him as his personal physician on his gruelling overseas journeys. In 1863-64 they travelled to North Africa, where Montefiore negotiated for better treatment of the Jews living in Morocco. A description of the journey was later published in a book written and illustrated by Hodgkin.

On a trip to Palestine with Montefiore in 1866, Hodgkin contracted dysentery and died on April 5. He was buried in Jaffa (today’s Tel Aviv), his grave marked with an obelisk.