William Pollock came of a well-known legal family; his father, George F. Pollock, grandson of Chief Baron Pollock, was Senior Master of the Supreme Court and King’s Remembrancer. His mother was the daughter of Rev. Henry Herbert of Rathdowney, Ireland. He went to school at Haileybury and studied medicine at St. George’s Hospital, where, after qualifying in 1881, he acted as house surgeon. He then received the same post at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, and at the same time entered Trinity College as an undergraduate. He took the degrees of M.B,, Ch.B, in 1888 and afterwards spent a year studying midwifery at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. Having made a long sea voyage to improve his health, he settled in practice in London, becoming assistant physician to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in 1891 and assistant obstetric physician to the Westminster Hospital in 1893. He remained on the staffs of both Hospitals till his death, and lectured on midwifery at the latter. He was connected also, for shorter periods, with St. George’s Hanover Square Dispensary, the Grosvenor Hospital for Women, the Westminster Dispensary, and, as professor of midwifery, with the Royal Army Medical College, Millbank. He examined for Cambridge University and the Conjoint Board. Pollock was a tall man whose somewhat melancholy appearance heightened the effect of his natural drollery and powers as a mimic. At school and university, he was known as one of the fastest hurdlers in the country until sustaining a vascular injury which prevented him from taking strenuous exercise, and handicapped him in his career, for the rest of his life. He married in 1889 Athol, eldest daughter of James Horne Stewart of Bathurst, N.S.W., and had a son and a daughter.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1909; B.M.J., 1909]