Howard Henry Tooth

Howard Henry Tooth attended St. John's College, Cambridge, and received his clinical education at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, qualifying in 1880. Following a period as casualty physician he worked as a demonstrator in physiology and medical tutor and demonstrator in morbid anatomy. He was conferred doctor of medicine at the University of Cambridge for a 43 page dissertation titled The peroneal type of progressive muscular atrophy which was read on May 26, 1886. He was appointed assistant physician in 1897. He spent the rest of his career at Saint Bartholomew's Hospital, becoming full physician in 1906 and retiring in 1921. Tooth also had appointments at the Metropolitan Hospital and the National Hospital for the Paralysed and the Epileptic, which is now the National Hospital for Neurological Disease, Queen's Square.

During the South Africa War - the Boer War - of 1899 to 1902, Tooth served in the Portland Hospital, a mobile unit serving in Cape Town and Bloemfontain. After his return to England he commanded the medical unit of the London University Officer training corps. During World War I he was a consulting physician with the rank of colonel, initially placed in command of the 1st London General Hospital at Camberwell, before serving in Malta and Italy, where he was mentioned three times in dispatches.

Ill health had necessitated his return before the end of the war, and he never fully recovered from this illness. He retired in 1921 and moved to Hadleigh in the Suffolk countryside. In 1925 he had a cerebral haemorrhage while driving his car, and died three months later.

• In Memoriam Howard H Tooth.
  St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports, London, 1925, 58: 9.
• Obituary: British Medical Journal, London, 1925; I: 988.
• Obituary. St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports, 1925, 32: 142.
• Howard Henry Tooth (1856-1925) of Charcot-Marie-Tooth’s Disease.
  Medical Press, April 18, 1956.
• Howard Henry Tooth (1856-1925).
  Journal of Neurology, January 2000, 247 (1): 3-4.