When I use a word . . . Medical blue plaques in London.
Jeffrey K AronsonPublished in: BMJ (Clinical research ed.) (2024)
In 1863 the MP William Ewart suggested that "it might be practicable... to have inscribed on those houses in London which have been inhabited by celebrated persons, the names of such persons." Accordingly, in 1867 the first such inscriptions, which came to be known as blue plaques, were put up by the Society of Arts, commemorating Lord Byron and Napoleon III at places in London where they had lived. The society put up 35 such plaques over the next 35 years when the scheme was taken over by the London County Council, which gave way to the Greater London Council in 1965 and finally English Heritage, in 1986. Among London's 1000 or so blue plaques several medical men and women, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers, are commemorated. They include Cecil Belfield-Clarke, Hannah Billig, Richard Bright, Edith Louisa Cavell, Henry Hallett Dale, Charles Darwin, Henry Havelock Ellis, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Thomas Hodgkin, William Hunter and his brother John, Joseph Lister, James Mackenzie, Rachel McMillan and her sister Margaret, William Marsden, Florence Nightingale, Ronald Ross, Mary Seacole, Hans Sloane, and George Frederick Still.
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