Sir Norman Moore, 1st Baronet

Sir Norman Moore, 1st Baronet, FRCP (8 January 1847 – 30 November 1922) was a British doctor and historian, best known for his work with the Royal College of Physicians and his writings on history of medicine. Born in Higher Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, the only child of abolitionist and social reformer Rebecca Moore, née Fisher, of Limerick and the noted Irish political economist Robert Ross Rowan Moore, Moore worked in a cotton mill before studying natural sciences in Cambridge and then going on to study comparative anatomy at St Bartholomew's Hospital.

Early life Moore was born in Higher Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, in 1847. He was the only child of abolitionist and social reformer Rebecca Moore, née Fisher, of Limerick and the noted Irish political economist Robert Ross Rowan Moore. The couple had been estranged since before Norman's birth, and he was raised by Rebecca through the support of her circle of Liberal nonconformist friends at Manchester. He studied initially at Chorlton High School, but left at the age of 14 to work in a cotton mill. He studied at Owens College from 1862 until 1865, and then read natural sciences at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, from 1865 to 1868, graduating in 1869. During his time in Cambridge he met and became friends with Francis Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin, and the Reverend Whitwell Elwin.

He succeeded Sir William Osler as president of the History of Medicine Society at the RSM, in 1914.

One of his greatest works, written in two volumes over a period of 30 years, was History of St Bartholomew's Hospital (1918). The history of the hospital was also the subject of the Rede Lecture he gave in 1914: St Bartholomew's Hospital in peace and war.

Through his mother Moore met Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, who in turn introduced him to artists and literary figures including Hercules Brabazon Brabazon, William De Morgan, the Rossettis Dante Gabriel, Christina, William Michael and Maria Francesca, Helen and William Allingham, George Eliot, and Mme Belloc and her children, Hilaire and Marie. His old college, St Catharine's, made him an honorary fellow in 1909. and was elected senior censor in 1908. He combined his medical studies and numerous lectureships with his study and reproduction of ancient manuscripts. Amy contracted tuberculosis and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900. Moore, despite his nonconformist upbringing, did so as well. Amy died on 25 August 1901, and Moore married her first cousin, Milicent Ludlow in 1903. In 1920 Moore received an honorary LLD from Cambridge, but by then he had been aged by the war, never fully recovering from the death of his son, and his writing began to show signs of Parkinsonism. He died in Hancox, near Battle in East Sussex, on 30 November 1922. An obituary in The Times grudgingly wrote that his work ‘lacked that deeper scholarship’ which would ‘render it lasting’. This was refuted by M. R. James, then the provost of Eton College who wrote to The Times on 8 December 1922 declaring that ‘I have never met any man whose erudition was so varied, lay so ready to hand, or was so delightfully enlivened by human and humorous touches’.

Lectureships Bradshaw Lecturer (1889) Harveian Orator (1901) FitzPatrick Lecturer (1905–06) Lumleian Lecturer (1909) Linacre Lecture (1913) Rede Lecture (1914)