John Gordon Harrower

Prof John Gordon Harrower FRSE FRCSE (1890-1936) was a Scottish anatomist. He was an expert on the human skull, and classified many separate Asiatic types.

Life

He was born on 4 April 1890 in Glasgow the son of John Harrower of 6 Valeview Terrace^[1] in Langside in the south of the city. He won a scholarship to Allan Glen's School and was educated alongside contemporaries such as John Vernon Harrison. Initially training primarily in Mathematics and Electricity he had a thorough knowledge of electricity and in 1910 obtained a senior post at Glasgow Tramways Power Station. In the First World War he was seen as an essential worker in this role and continued until 1919.^[2]

However, his interested shifted from electricity to radiology, and he had decided from 1911 to retrain as a physician. He attended night school at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow and graduated MB ChB in 1913 and gaining his doctorate in 1918. He did not put this skill into practice until 1919, when he became a Demonstrator (dissecting bodies in front of students during anatomy lectures) at Glasgow University. Rapidly rising he was given a professorship to teach Anatomy at the Singapore Medical College in 1922, and sailed across the oceans to take on this role. In 1926 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Thomas Hastie Bryce, Sir John Graham Kerr, Diarmid Noel Paton, and Ralph Stockman.^[3]

He died in Singapore on 9 April 1936, a few days after his 46th birthday. He was buried at a well-attended ceremony in Bidadari Cemetery later on the same day.^[4]

Publications

• A Study of the Hokien and the Tamil Skull (1926)
• Variations in the Region of the Foramen Magnum (1923)
• A Study of the Crania of the Hylam Chinese (1931)

References