Alfred Downing Fripp (surgeon)

Sir Alfred Downing Fripp (1865 to 1930) was a British surgeon at Guy's Hospital in London and honorary surgeon to the royal households of King Edward VII and King George V. Born in Blandford Forum, he became a trusted doctor to Prince Albert Victor and later to Edward VII, who made him Surgeon in Ordinary. During the Second Boer War he organised and ran the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital at Deelfontein in South Africa, taking far more nurses, orderlies and specialists than the army medical corps usually provided, including an X-ray specialist and a dental expert. The hospital's success contrasted sharply with the army's own hospitals, and on his return he pressed for reform of the Army Medical Service. He was knighted in 1903 at the age of thirty-seven, the youngest doctor to receive that honour. In the First World War he served as consulting surgeon to the Navy at Rosyth and then worked in private hospitals in London. He died in 1930.