St Clair Thomson

Sir St Clair Thomson (died 1943) was a leading British laryngologist and surgeon of Irish and Scottish family, born at Fahan in County Donegal. He studied at King's College London, qualified in the early 1880s and served as house surgeon to Joseph Lister at King's College Hospital. After work at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, as a ship's surgeon for the Union-Castle Line and as a physician in Florence and St Moritz, he turned in the early 1890s to laryngology, visiting leading specialists in Vienna and Freiburg. Returning to London in 1893 he became a consultant laryngologist, helped edit The Laryngoscope, and rose to physician in charge at King's College Hospital in 1905 and professor of laryngology there in 1908. He was throat physician to King Edward VII, was knighted in 1912 and served as President of the Royal Society of Medicine from 1925 to 1927. His books included Diseases of the Nose and Throat and Cancer of the Larynx, and he also lectured on Shakespeare and medicine.