Bywaters, Eric George Lapthorne (1910-2003)

The following is an interim description which may change when detailed cataloguing takes place.

Please note that this archive contains patient data that is highly sensitive in nature. When the archive is catalogued, the patient data will require closure for the lifetime of the data subjects in accordance with the 1998 Data Protection Act.

Case records, clinical summaries, discharge summary charts, biopsy reports, post-mortem histology slides and other clinical material relating to various aspects of Bywaters's work, 1940s-1970s; photograph albums of staff at Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow, Bucks, 1948-1975; unpublished account of crush syndrome, 1940-1945 by Bywaters and Barlow, including some original photographs and illustrations; three charts of clinical data on crush injury victims, 1940-1941; reprints of published papers.

Professor Eric George Lapthorne Bywaters, CBE, FRCP (1910-2003) qualified in medicine in 1933 and became a pathologist with posts at the Bland Sutton Institute and the Courtauld Institute of Pathology. In 1937 he went to the Massachusetts General Hospital as a Research Fellow, where he studied patients with lupus erythematosis.

Bywaters returned to London in 1939 and worked at the British Postgraduate Medical School in Hammersmith Hospital, where he established a study on sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis. During the London Blitz, he studied casualties who were trapped by falling masonry and who went on to develop fatal kidney failure, a phenomenon that became known as "crush syndrome". From 1944-1945 this work was continued, in conjunction with Erasmus Barlow, at the MRC Shock Unit in Newcastle, moving back to London with the renewed bombing campaigns of 1945. Preventive and therepeutic measures were developed for the syndrome which were later widely taken up. In 1946-1947 Bywaters was also involved in setting up the first artifical kidney in the UK.

In addition to his work at Hammersmith, in 1947 Bywaters became Director of the Special Unit for Juvenile Rheumatism at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital at Taplow, near Maidenhead. Under his leadership this became an internationally important centre for pioneering work initially on rheumatic fever and later on juvenile chronic arthritis and other conditions. The hospital closed its research function in 1975 when Bywaters retired.

At the time of his death in 2003, Bywaters was Emeritus Professor of Rheumatology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, University of London.