Sir Grafton Elliot Smith

Biography

August 15, 1871, Grafton Elliot Smith was born to Stephen Sheldrick Smith and Mary Jane Evans in Grafton, New South Wales. His father was the principal at Grafton Public School in London, where Grafton attended grade school. In 1883, the Smiths moved to Sydney, Australia, where Grafton would continue his education at Darlington Public school(4). Being that his father had an scholastic career, there was an expectation of high academic achievement in the family(1). Elliot showed great interest in science and mathematics, as this interest may have been sparked from his experience dissecting a shark at the age of 10(2). During high school at Sydney Boys High School, he went to evening physiology classes taught by Thomas Anderson Stuart. Professor Stuart claimed that there was still massive amounts of information about the brain that had yet to be discovered, which also may have inspired Grafton's interest in studying the brain. Smith would go on to study medicine at the University of Sydney. He did extraordinarily well in his undergraduate studies and graduated in 1893 with a bachelor of medicine as well as a Ch.M- a master of surgery. He would then begin his residency at Prince Alfred Hospital, shortly before becoming an administrator in the physiology department at the University of Sydney. Smith interest in neuroanatomy developed further as he began to study the brain, specifically of non-placental mammals. He graduated in 1895 as an M.D, and received a gold medal for his research paper on the anatomy and histology of non-placental mammals(4).

Next, Grafton was seeking his PhD. and took advantage of a travelling scholarship that the university was offering, and travelled to England and became a research student at St. John's College in Cambridge. He published numerous papers about neuro-anatomy, which were recognized by st. John's, who ultimately elected him as a fellow of the college in 1899(1). Following this accolade, he received an invitation to become the Chair of Anatomy in Cairo, at the Egyptian Government School of Medicine. He held this position until 1909 and married Kate Emily Macredie. During this decade, Grafton and colleague, Fredrick Wood Jones, investigated countless mummies and the remains of human brains in Nubia. Smith provided insight to the medical society in egypt from his research of how certain diseases affected the brains of the bodies they studied. For this, he was elected Fellowship into the Royal Society in 1907 (5).

Grafton would return to England in 1909 where he would occupy Chair of Anatomy in Manchester for the next decade. During this period, Smith created a hypothesis for diffusion, give expert opinion on the skull involved in the piltdown discovery. He would be transferred to London to hold Chair of Anatomy, as he continued to work in hospitals, and did research on shellshock (2).