Hugh Thursfield, son of T. W. Thursfield, F.R.C.P, a prominent citizen of Leamington, was sent to Leamington College for his schooling. An exhibitioner of Trinity College, Oxford, he read Greats as an undergraduate before entering St. Bartholomew’s to study medicine. After qualifying in 1897 — in which year he also won the Kirkes gold medal and the scholarship for clinical medicine — he was given house appointments and became a demonstrator of pathology at his own Hospital, where he was elected assistant physician in 1913. As there was no prospect of a normal vacancy for a full physician before the year of his retirement, he was given this office by special decree in 1928. But the Hospital for Sick Children, where he became a registrar in 1899 and was elected assistant physician in 1905, and physician in 1920, was his main centre of attraction, and his writings mostly concerned paediatrics. He was an original editor, with Garrod and Batten, of the well-known Diseases of Children (1913) and, with Miller, of the Archives of Diseases in Childhood, founded in 1926. During the 1914-1918 War he served as a major in the 14th General Hospital at Boulogne, and early in the 1939-1945 War he was made physician to the Park Prewett Hospital, near Basingstoke, where he had retired in 1935. The fact that his practice was never particularly large mattered little to Thursfield. He was an erudite, tolerant man, a keen ornithologist and a connoisseur of red wines. He died unmarried at Basingstoke.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1944; B.M.J., 1944]