Hastings Gilford

Hastings Gilford was an English surgeon, born at Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, on 2 July 1861 and died on 6 September 1941. He qualified at Guy's Hospital in 1887, took the fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1889, worked as clinical assistant at the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children and as surgeon to the Reading Dispensary, and in the First World War was surgeon in charge of the Sutherland War Hospital. He is best known for his 1897 description of the condition now called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome. Later he turned to the causes of cancer, writing under the pseudonym John Cope, and argued that cancer was a disease of civilization linked to diet and constipation; one review in the American Journal of Cancer called these ideas long since disproved. His books included Tumours and Cancers (1925), Cancer: Civilization: Degeneration (1932) and The Cancer Problem and its Solution (1934).