A fact, noted in a biography of one of them, is that all three authors of the editions of The British Amphibians & Reptiles and its successor in the Collins New Naturalist Series published from 1951 onwards were medically qualified
There was very little academic interest in reptiles and amphibians in Britain. Yes, of course, there were the famous herpetologists at the Natural History Museum in London but their interests in the 20th century were taxonomy and systematics, again not of burning interest to the biologists of the day. And there were those using amphibians to study developmental processes and basic physiology for which the frog is ideal. Comparative studies also included reptiles and amphibians but generally only en passant. Famous British palaeontologists devoted much of their lives to reptiles and amphibians but of the physiology, behaviour and ecology of living forms there was virtually nothing. Thus in a directory of research in British universities in 1960-61, only three individual entries refer to research in herpetology (other than a very specific interest in, for example, the structure of a particular organ) or developmental biology. They were: Angus Bellairs at St Mary’s Hospital (reptilian anatomy), London, Eric T.B. Francis in Sheffield (reptilian physiology) and C.L. Smith in Liverpool (amphibian physiology).
I think there are two reasons why research on reptiles and amphibians in Britain was not a topic of interest in the universities. The first is obviously the sparsity of species. The second is that research solely on one group of vertebrates, as opposed to a wider comparative approach, might have seen to have been unimportant in that there were unlikely to be discoveries made of wide biological significance. Whatever the reasons, it is not surprising that the major advances in reptilian ecological physiology, particularly thermoregulation, were made in the U.S.A. in the middle years of the 20th century where there is a rich herpetofauna and considerable academic interest.
The man who pulled all the information of British amphibians and reptiles together, including that gathered by very gifted amateur naturalists in Britain as well as in continental Europe, was Malcolm Arthur Smith (1875-1958). He was keen on amphibians and reptiles as a child but knew the only way he could pursue that activity was by earning a living as a doctor. After qualifying at Charing Cross Hospital and practice in London he went off to Bangkok as medical officer to the British Legation. That job was then extended to physician to the royal household. During his time in Siam, now Thailand, he was active in natural history, collecting specimens and writing accounts of the herpetofauna of south-east Asia. In 1925 at the age of 50 he retired to London where he was given space at the Natural History Museum. From there until his death he published extensively particularly on the reptiles of south and south-east Asia. From its founding in 1947, Smith was president of the British Herpetological Society. It was when he was over 70 that he turned to the British herpetofauna again, with the first edition of the New Naturalist volume appearing in 1951.
Angus d’Albini Bellairs (1918-1990) was co-editor of the fifth edition onwards of Smith’s New Naturalist book. Keen in reptiles as a boy he included zoology in his pre-clinical medical course at Cambridge. After qualifying in medicine from University College Hospital, London, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in north Africa, Italy and Burma, collecting reptiles throughout and sending preserved specimens back to London. After the war he published two papers with Malcolm Smith. One, on the head gland of snakes, read to the Linnean Society in 1944, must have been the result of work done while he was a medical student or while he was still in the army; the material was mainly that collected by Smith in Siam before 1925. The second paper, published in 1953, was on the egg-tooth of snakes. By that time he had been appointed lecturer in the anatomy department at the London Hospital medical school by James Dixon Boyd (1907-1969) who had been one oh his lecturers at Cambridge and who had stored Bellairs’s specimens from overseas. They published a paper together. Boyd took Bellairs back to Cambridge with him in 1951 but Bellairs preferred London and faced with a heavy teaching load in human anatomy he moved to St Mary’s Hospital medical school in 1953. Many anatomy departments had interests in comparative anatomy and Bellairs became the torchbearer for academic herpetology in Britain, albeit with an emphasis on anatomy, since he was self-avowedly ignorant of the advances in physiology, behaviour and ecology.
Joining Bellairs as co-editor of Smith’s book and then the sole author of the follow-up volume in the same series, Reptiles and Amphibians in Britain, Deryk Frazer had a somewhat similar history but this time came from medicine to become a professional working in conservation via physiology. John Francis Deryk Frazer (1916-2008) was born of a professor of anatomy at St Mary’s, John Ernest Sullivan Frazer (1870-1946). Switching from maths to physiology at Oxford he qualified in medicine in 1942. For the rest of the war he served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy on the new frigate HMS Helford in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. He then became Assistant Lecturer in Physiology at St Mary’s, a famous department headed by Arthur St George Joseph McCarthy Huggett FRS (1897-1968) engaged in fetal physiology and growth. Frazer worked on factors affecting fertility in the rat which formed the basis of his London PhD thesis awarded in 1953 (a mistake in a biography mistakenly attributed his PhD to work on toad movements). From St Mary’s he moved to the department of physiology at Charing Cross Hospital medical school where his main work was again on fetal growth and survival in collaboration with Huggett. However in 1959 he ditched academia to join the Nature Conservancy where he was a member of the British delegation at the first CITES convention. He did, however, continue his interests in fetal growth, publishing a paper in 1970 with the then late Professor Huggett. He continued his early interest in amphibians and reptiles into retirement particularly in Kent.
I knew both Bellairs and Frazer but only when writing this did I realise that Frazer was the older man.
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| Smith and Frazer from Contributions to the History of Herpetology (see below); Bellairs from Herpetological Journal |
It was not unusual, of course, for those in medical practice to indulge in biological hobbies but the involvement of the the three authors was something on a much greater scale. Britain’s medical schools, which I have to explain were and are very different from those, say, in the U.S.A., produced many qualified doctors who did not want to become doctors in the first place but persisted under parental pressure, were attracted to biological research but who finished their clinical studies in order to gain a qualification, or who simply found they did not like medical practice once they had qualified. Direct entry into the biological sciences was often difficult especially for boys since biology was not taught at all in what were considered the good schools.
An example from our time as students in the 1960s was the famous insect physiologist, Sir Vincent Wigglesworth FRS (1899-1994). All his spare time as a medical student was spent studying insects. Medical graduates turning to zoology were always described as ‘having seen the light’.
Biographies of all three are in the three volumes of Contributions to the History of Herpetology, edited by Kraig Adler, Society for the Study of Reptiles and Amphibians.
Frazer D. 1983. Reptiles and Amphibians in Britain. London: Collins
Smith M. 1951. The British Amphibians and Reptiles. London: Collins
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