Henry Roy Dean

Henry Roy Dean, MD, LL.D, D.Sc, FRCP (19 February 1879 – 13 February 1961), also known as Prof. H. R. Dean, was a professor of Pathology at the University of Cambridge and Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Biography Henry Roy Dean was born in Bournemouth, Hampshire (now Dorset), England to Joshua Dean and Elizabeth Dean, née MacCormac. Elizabeth Dean was a member of a distinguished Northern Irish medical family and she was the daughter of Henry MacCormac and the sister of Sir William MacCormac. Dean was educated at Sherborne School and he attended with first-class honours the School of Natural Science at New College, Oxford, to be graduated MB BCh in 1904, after medical training at St Thomas' Hospital, where he was medical registrar and after resident assistant physician. After a senior demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford, he took MRCP in 1906, a Radcliffe Travelling Fellowship in 1909 (to study at Wassermann Laboratory, Berlin), D.M. in 1912 and FRCP in 1913. From 1910 he was assistant bacteriologist at the Lister Institute, London before to become in 1912 Professor of Pathology and Bacteriology at the University of Sheffield. Then he was Professor of Pathology first in the University of Manchester from 1915, where he was also a Major (R.A.M.C.) during the war, then in the University of Cambridge in August 1922, where he was also deputy professor of physic substituting Prof. John Ryle during the second world war. In Cambridge, in the then small Department of Pathology in Downing Street, early Dean was able to let include in 1925 Pathology as a subject for Part II of the Natural Science Tripos. That was a successful choice, even for the history of pathology: many students who had taken the Part II Pathology course would go on to occupy important positions in pathology and other branches of medicine (among them was Max Barrett). Dean was engaged to design a new building of the Department of Pathology in Tennis Court Road, where it is today from September 1928. In 1946 he improved his course (58 lectures) with a training scheme for the would-be pathologists (2 or 3 years of experience of laboratory work). Apart his own works, he guided others to their subsequent experimental works, as well as to their publications on immunology.