Wilfrid Edgecombe

Career

Edgecombe read medicine at the medical school of the University College of Liverpool, where he studied alongside John Hay. Because Liverpool University was not yet authorised to grant degrees, he then continued his studies and qualified at University College London.

Bedside manner Around 1951, inspired by Cato Maior de Senectute, Edgecombe published de Senectute. It includes a comment about his own attitude as a medical consultant towards his anxious patients. He ceased to concentrate on surgery. During the First World War, Edgecombe served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). By 1919 Edgecombe was petitioning the hospital governors to build a new, larger, hospital on Harrogate's outskirts. His efforts kick-started plans for the Harrogate and District General Hospital, with himself as chairman of the building committee. as the Harrogate and District General Hospital on Knaresborough Road. The Princess Royal was a previous patient of Edgecombe's; he had attended her daily at Goldsborough Hall in the last four days of her 1924 pregnancy. He and Henry Simson were the first to announce publicly the birth of the child, Gerald David Lascelles, Edgecombe's name being repeated in many newspapers, such as The Inverness Courier, The London Evening News, The Daily Express, The Daily News, and The Warder and Dublin Weekly Mail.

Edgecombe was chairman of the medical staff of the hospital (now known as Harrogate District Hospital) for thirteen years,

We are in the position of the prisoner in the dock awaiting the verdict and sentence ... If the voluntary hospitals are entirely taken over by the Government, and I cannot conceive of a more crass piece of stupidity, then it means the death of the contributory scheme.

As a representative of Harrogate Medical Society, Edgecombe was a witness in a 1937 Ministry of Health enquiry regarding the Royal Baths Hospital, Harrogate. He supported an application on behalf of 104 doctors who "had been recommending better accommodation and greater efficiency of treatments at the Baths for the past ten years". Explaining their reasons, he said:

Institutions

Between 1919 and 1932, According to Richard R. Trail, Edgecombe was "perhaps the last of the spa physicians". of which he was president in 1905 and 1939. The Ripon Gazette described him as "the doyen of the Harrogate Medical Society". Unusually for a Harrogate doctor, he was elected president of the Leeds and West Riding Medico-Chirurgical Society.

Other interests In his youth Edgecombe was an "enthusiastic" skater,

Edgecombe wrote poetry, especially Christmas poems which he shared with his friends. Many of those poems were published in The Alpine Post, Punch and other papers. In 1914 Edgecombe published those and some hitherto unpublished poems in his book, A Mixed Grill.

Obituaries The British Medical Journal commented in 1963: Thus was founded the annual Edgecombe Lecture. The inaugural lecture was delivered on 11 March 1964 to HMS by Lord Cohen of Birkenhead.

Undated

Other publications A copy of this poetry collection was presented by the author to The Royal College of Physicians in 1935. This book was quoted by Lord Cohen of Birkenhead in 1965.