Edmund Birkett’s father, a solicitor, John Birkett of London, sent him at the age of eight to Eton, where Gladstone was one of his senior schoolfellows. He went up to Caius College, Cambridge, in 1833 and won the Mickleburgh scholarship for chemistry in 1838, the year of his M.B. degree. Leaving Cambridge, he obtained a number of minor posts at Guy’s Hospital and that of physician to the Surrey Dispensary.

In 1849 he became physician to the City of London Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. Birkett, who jointly edited the Guy's Hospital Reports till 1853, published a sixteenth edition of A. T. Thomson’s Conspectus of the British Pharmacopoeias in 1852 and a fifth edition of Golding Bird’s Urinary Deposits in 1857. He took a full share in the work of the Royal College of Physicians, being Censor and Vice-President (1886). At the time of his death his name stood second in seniority in the College List. Birkett, who retired in 1890, was a quiet, learned, but unenterprising man, and a practising Christian given to good works. He married in 1850 Awdry Heydon, daughter of B. E. Battley, by whom he had two sons and a daughter.

G H Brown

[B.M.J., 1903; Biog.Hist.of Caius College, ii, 221]