Sydney Domville Rowland

Sydney Domville Rowland (29 March 1872 – 6 March 1917) was an English physician and the world's first editor of a radiology journal. He coined the term "skiagraphy" and wrote some of the first works on X-rays in the Archives of Clinical Skiagraphy that preceded the British Journal of Radiology.

Rowland worked in India and helped confirm how plague is spread by rats carrying fleas, and later joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War as a bacteriologist in France, where he worked on septic wounds, typhoid carriers and gas gangrene, and set up No. 1 Mobile Laboratory, the first of its kind. He died at the age of 44 years after contracting meningitis during his work.

Early life and education Sydney Rowland was born in Cornwall, the United Kingdom, on 29 March 1872, the eldest son of the Reverend William J. Rowland and Margaret Domville. He had one sister, Agnes, and two brothers, William and Cecil. He won a natural sciences scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Natural History Society, and from where he graduated in 1892 with a 1st Class in Natural Sciences Tripos Part I, and in 1893 with a 2nd Class in Part II. In the preface to the first issue, written in April 1896, he wrote that "the object of this publication is to put on record in permanent form some sort of the most striking applications of the new photography to the needs of medicine and surgery". The first of its kind, it formed the model for later mobile laboratories. In 1915 he rose to the rank of Major and worked with the 26th General Hospital Royal Army Medical Corps.

Selected publications

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