Geoffrey Walter Boden

Geoffrey Walter Boden (Avatar)

1905-1957

Vol V

Pg 42

Geoffrey Walter Boden

1905-1957

Vol V

Pg 42

b.9 December 1905 d.11 October 1957

BSc Lond(1928) DMR Lond(1939) MRCS LRCP(1937) MRCP(1939) FFR(1950) FRCP(1957)

Geoffrey Boden was born in Hampstead, London, the son of Walter John Boden, an estate agent and Edith, daughter of George Reed, a cabinet maker. His schools were St. Ives Grammar and the Haberdashers’, Hampstead, his university London, and his medical school St.Bartholomew’s. After taking an honours B.Sc, he organised the laboratories of Messrs. Johnson Matthey where radium sources were being prepared for clinical use and so contributed to the success of the Radium Commission.

On qualifying he held house posts at St. Bartholomew’s before his appointment as chief assistant to Geoffrey Evans. From 1939 to 1944 he served with the R.A.M.C, in the Middle East, and when he was invalided home with a radiation induced epithelioma of a finger, which had to be amputated, he returned to the radiotherapy department of St. George’s Hospital to which he had been appointed assistant physician in 1939.

In 1945 he went to the Christie Hospital, Manchester, and in 1950 was appointed radiotherapist to the London Hospital. There, as in his previous posts, his gay personality brought him deep and lasting affection, and his administrative ability in developing radiotherapy throughout the North-East Metropolitan Region the admiration of every colleague.

By his work the whole system of radiation measurements in clinical practice was placed on a sound foundation and new light thrown on radiation myelitis and the importance of avoiding heavy irradiation of the spinal cord. These advances were recognised in the awards of the Twining medal of the Faculty of Radiologists in 1952 and of the Stanley Melville medal of the Society of Radiologists in 1956.

In 1954 he married Edith May, daughter of Walter James Matthew, a draper’s merchant. They had two daughters.

Richard R Trail

[Brit.med.J., 1957, 2, 1054-5; Lancet, 1957, 2, 852; Lond. Hosp. Gaz., 1957, 60, 173-4 (p).]