Edward Weston Hurst was born in Birmingham, the son of Edward William Hurst and his wife Clarinda, daughter of Thomas Wem. He was educated at King Edward VI School and the University of Birmingham, where he graduated in 1922. In 1926, after house appointments at the National Hospital, Queen Square, London, he was appointed clinical pathologist to the Miller General Hospital, and became pathologist to the International (Millbank) Fund for Research on Poliomyelitis at the Lister Institute in 1928. He spent two years, from 1932 to 1934, in the United States as associate at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Princeton, New Jersey, returning to the Lister Institute as a member of the research staff. In 1935, at the early age of 35, he became William Withering lecturer at the University of Birmingham.
In 1936 the South Australian Government decided to set up an Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science which, among other things, would take over the role of the Adelaide Hospital laboratories of pathology and bacteriology. Weston Hurst was selected as foundation director, but his initial appointment was as director of the hospital laboratories, so that he might play an active role in preparing the regulations for the new Institute. The IMVS Act was passed in 1937, and he took up his dual appointment as director of the Institute and Keith Sheridan professor of experimental medicine in the University of Adelaide. His initial appointment was for five years. Shortly after his reappointment in 1943 he resigned and returned to England, where he became a member of the research staff of Imperial Chemical Pharmaceuticals Limited, in Manchester, and later a member of the research staff of the Central Toxicological Laboratory of ICI, until his retirement in 1967.
As a young man he enjoyed alpine walking and photography, and his love of Italy led him to study Italian intensively. He was a member of the Institute of Linguists. On retirement, he and his wife went to live in Malta, where he continued his interest in photography. He was married twice: first to Phyllis Edith, daughter of JG Picknett MA, in 1926. They had three daughters. Phyllis died in 1940, and in 1942 he married Barbara Ternent, daughter of WT Cooke DSc, of Adelaide; they had a son and a daughter.
Weston Hurst was a strict disciplinarian and an excellent teacher, greatly appreciated by his students. He contributed a number of papers on pathology and allied subjects to European and foreign journals, and was a lifelong member of the Pathological Society, and, for some years, a member of the British Neuropathological Society.
Sir Gordon Wolstenholme
Valérie Luniewska
[Neuropath. appl. Neurobiol., 1982, 8, 191]