Obituary. S. P. Bedson, 1886-1969

Abstract

Sam Bedson was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where his father was Professor of Chemistry. He was educated privately up to the age of ten and after a year at a preparatory school went to Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire, where he spent the next six years. In 1904 he entered the Faculty of Science at Armstrong College and three years later graduated BSc. with Honours. Then followed five years in the Durham University College of Medicine and in 1912 he graduated M.B., B.S. again with Honours. He spent the next year at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he attended the annual course in microbiology : among the lecturers were Metchnikov, ROUX, Borrel, Laveran and Besredka. During this year also he studied in Weinberg's laboratory toxic substances from Ascaris and Taenia. An account of this work submitted as a thesis won him the M.D. of Durham with a gold medal. In 1913 he returned to London and was working as British Medical Scholar with John Ledingham at the Lister Institute on blood platelets when war broke out. He was not accepted by the Royal Army Medical Corps because his training had been in research, so he obtained a commission in the Northumberland Fusiliers. He suffered a chest wound in Gallipoli

February 1939: the start of the first journal publishing research in virology

“…The Each of the above scientists carried out groundbreak ing work in their particular area and laid the basis for the developments of the field in subsequent decades. Samuel P. Bedson in the 1920s developed diagnostic tools for footand mouth disease virus and examined the causative agent of psittacosis which had been brought into the United Kingdom by infected psittacine birds [2]. Otto Waldmann in the 1930s also worked on footandmouth disease virus, developing a vaccine using inactivated virus preparations that provided a much longer lasting immunity than that with previously used immune sera [5].…”