Raymond Crawfurd was born at East Grinstead, the sixth son of Rev. Charles Walter Payne Crawfurd, by his wife Mary, daughter of J. A. Ogle, F.R.C.P, Regius professor of medicine at Oxford. He was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he graduated in classics in 1888. At King’s College, London, his medical school, he was the outstanding student of his year, winning both Junior and Senior scholarships. Having taken the B.M, B.Ch, degrees in 1894, he filled resident posts in King’s College Hospital and became assistant physician, for a few years, to the Victoria Hospital for Children. In 1896 he was elected assistant physician to the Royal Free Hospital, from which he resigned, when full physician, in 1908. He lectured on pathology in the Hospital and on materia medica in the London School of Medicine for Women. Crawfurd’s name, however, will be remembered primarily in connection with King’s College Hospital. He was appointed assistant physician in 1898, physician in 1905 and consulting physician in 1930, and was lecturer first on materia medica and then on clinical medicine, and, from 1900 to 1904, dean of the medical department. In association with his old schoolfellow, Headlam, principal of King’s College, he took a large share in organising the removal of the Hospital to Denmark Hill and in establishing its future prosperity and status. On the completion of the new Medical School in 1933, his achievements were recognised by the award of a knighthood.

Two other institutions to benefit from Crawfurd’s services were the Royal College of Physicians and Epsom College. For the former he performed the duties of Registrar for the last thirteen years of his life, having already held office as Senior Censor and delivered the FitzPatrick Lectures (1911-12) and Harveian Oration (1919). As chairman of the council of Epsom College from 1923 to 1936, he raised large sums of money for the erection of new buildings and promoted a considerable increase in the number of its boys.

A long illness in his forty-first year, which left him lame for the rest of his life and caused him to withdraw from private practice, gave Crawfurd the opportunity to cultivate an interest in the history of medicine which later manifested itself in such publications as The Last Days of Charles II (1909), and Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (1914). Crawfurd indeed was a combination of scholar-physician, teacher, man of affairs and philanthropist; modest, wise, and courteous. He married in 1898 Ethelberta Ormrod, daughter of Colonel Arthur Bailey, J.P, of Bolton, and had three sons. He died in London.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1938; B.M.J., 1938; Lyle, 393; Dawson of Penn (Bertrand Edward Dawson), 1st Viscount, Sir Raymond Crawfurd, 1938; D.N.B., 1931-40, 201; Al.Oxon., I, 314]