Frank Tylecote, named after his father, a bank manager, was born at Cannock, Staffordshire. His mother was Georgina, daughter of Joseph Lewis Hall, an ordnance surveyor, of Edinburgh. From King’s School, Macclesfield, he entered the Manchester Medical School. Following experience in fevers and skin diseases, and in pathology in a Lancashire County Asylum, he was appointed resident medical officer to the Manchester Royal Infirmary. Not till 1914 did he reach his aim of joining its visiting staff; in the interval from 1911 he was on the staffs of the Chorlton-on-Medlock Dispensary and of the Salford Royal and Withington Hospitals. During World War I he served in France as a major, R.A.M.C. From 1929 to 1940 he was professor of medicine at Manchester.

Tylecote was not an inspiring teacher; his reserve and his idiosyncrasies of spot diagnosis and of dislike of diabetics did not endear him to students. But one of his observations deserves mention. In a letter dated July 18, 1927, on cancer of the lung, he wrote (Lancet, 1927, 2, 256-7): ‘I think that in almost every case I have seen and known the patient had been a regular smoker, generally of cigarettes.’ His heart was really in politics and in the use he could make thereby of his medical knowledge. He was a councillor (from 1931) and then an alderman (1949-63) of the city of Manchester, serving on its committees and on such bodies as the Association of Municipal Corporations, of which he was chairman from 1946 to 1963, the Central Midwives Board, the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing, and the board of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. At the College he was a Councillor, 1939-41.

In 1915 he married Charlotte Dora, daughter of John Boddan, of Heaton Moor, a yarn and cotton merchant; they had one son and one daughter. Two years after her death in 1930 he married Mabel Pythian, Ph.D., daughter of J. Ernest Pythian, of Holmes Chapel, Bramhall and Letchworth, who was an author and lecturer on art. They had one son.

Richard R Trail

[Brit.med.J., 1965, 2, 947; Lancet, 1965, 2, 798; Times, 18 Oct. 1965.]