Sir Alexander Ogston, 1844-1929

Celebrates the life of a royal surgeon and one of Scotland's most influential medical figures Sir Alexander Ogston's career was of far-ranging, yet under acknowledged, excellence. Inspired by the work of Joseph Lister and Robert Koch, Ogston was determined to find the cause of post-operative infection. Working in his home laboratory, he established the link between acute inflammation and suppuration and microorganisms, discovered (and named) staphylococcus (better known today in connection with MRSA) and correctly linked localised microorganism infections with blood poisoning. Ogston served as a medical volunteer during the 1885 Soudan Campaign and, in 1892, became Surgeon in Ordinary to Queen Victoria. Although instrumental in founding the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1898, he remained critical of the army medical services. These views were amply confirmed by the events of the Boer War, in which Ogston offered his medical services. During the Great War Ogston, in his early seventies and President of the British Medical Association, served as a surgeon with the British Red Cross at the Villa Trento hospital in northeast Italy - a site which served as an inspiration for the British hospital in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Key Features and Benefits  Offers the first biography of one of Scotland's most influential medical figures  Draws from Ogston's unpublished accounts of his military experiences  Ogston's experiences of the Soudan War (1881-9), Boer War (1899-1902) and Great War (1914-18) offer a powerful narrative exemplifying his calls to improve military medicine.  Relates Ogston's connections with major nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures such as Queen Victoria, Joseph Lister, Herbert Grierson, Tsar Nicholas II, Sir William Gatacre and G. M. Trevelyan. David A. Rennie is the author of American Writers and World War I (2020) and editor of Scottish Literature and World War I (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). His essays have appeared in The Hemingway Review, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review and the Cambridge History of American Literature and Culture in the Great War.