Sir Michael Francis Addison Woodruff, FRS, FRSE FRCS, was an English surgeon and scientist. He spent his youth in Australia, where he earned degrees in electrical engineering and medicine. After the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Australian Army Medical Corps, but was soon captured by Japanese forces and imprisoned in the Changi Prison Camp. While there, he devised an ingenious method of extracting nutrients from agricultural wastes to prevent malnutrition among his fellow POWs. At the conclusion of the war, Woodruff returned to England and began a long career as an academic surgeon, mixing clinical work and research. His work in transplantation biology led him to perform the first kidney transplant in the United Kingdom, on 30 October 1960.
About Michael Woodruff in brief
Sir Michael Francis Addison Woodruff, FRS, FRSE FRCS, was an English surgeon and scientist. He spent his youth in Australia, where he earned degrees in electrical engineering and medicine. After the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Australian Army Medical Corps, but was soon captured by Japanese forces and imprisoned in the Changi Prison Camp. While there, he devised an ingenious method of extracting nutrients from agricultural wastes to prevent malnutrition among his fellow POWs. At the conclusion of the war, Woodruff returned to England and began a long career as an academic surgeon, mixing clinical work and research. His work in transplantation biology led Woodruff to perform the first kidney transplant in the United Kingdom, on 30 October 1960. For this and his other scientific contributions, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1968 and made a Knight Bachelor in 1969. Although retiring from surgical work in 1976, he remained an active figure in the scientific community, researching cancer and serving on the boards of various medical and scientific organizations. Woodruff was born on 3 April 1911 in Mill Hill, London, England, the son of Harold AddisonWoodruff and his wife, Margaret Ada Cooper. In 1913, his father, a professor of veterinary medicine at the Royal Veterinary College in London, moved the family to Australia so he could take up the post of Professor of Veterinary Pathology and Director of the Veterinary Institute at the University of Melbourne. The family’s new life in Australia was interrupted by World War I, which prompted Harold to enlist in the armed services.
Michael and his brother went back to Australia in 1917 after their mother, Margaret, died of a staphylococcal septicaemia. The two boys lived with their mother and paternal grandmother in the latter’s residence in Finchley. In 1919, Harold remarried and his new wife raised the children from his first marriage. From then on he spent all of his childhood in Australia except for a year in Europe in 1924 when his father went on sabbatical leave at Paris’s Pasteur Institute. He decided to take up medical studies at the end of his third year of undergraduate study, but his parents wanted him to finish his degree first. He passed the primary exam for the Royal College of Surgeons in 1934, one of only four successful candidates who sat the examination in Melbourne that year. In 1937, he received an MBBS with honours as well as two prizes for internal and external medicine for surgery. He stayed in Australia until 1941, when he was posted to a casualty station in Malaya where he was a captain in the Tenth Medical Corps. According to his memoirs, he said that he was assigned to the Tenth Army General Hospital to clear the casualty station after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After his time at Malaya, he went on to become a house surgeon in Melbourne until he finished his Master of Surgery Degree in 1941. He then studied internal and internal medicine for one more year.
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