The medical career of Robert Seymour Bridges, FRCP (1844-1930): physician and Poet Laureate.

Abstract

Robert Bridges OM is the only medical graduate (he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1900) to have held the office of Poet Laureate. Educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and St Bartholomew's Hospital he practised as a casualty physician at his teaching hospital (where he made a series of highly critical remarks of the Victorian medical establishment) and subsequently as a full physician to the Great (later Royal) Northern Hospital. He was also a physician to the Hospital for Sick Children. It had for long been his intention to retire from the medical profession at the early age of 40! In 1913, Bridges was appointed Poet Laureate by King George V, and following a disappointingly sparse output of "official" work, published his greatest literary contribution-The Testament of Beauty-on his 85th birthday.