Abstract
Sir: In the review 1 of my book it is implied that the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is a direct successor to the London School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM). This is, however, an over-simplification and is not strictly accurate. The LSTM was founded in 1899 by the Seamen's Hospital Society at the Albert Dock Hospital as primarily a clinical institution; 2 in 1920 it moved to Endsleigh Gardens, Euston as the Hospital for Tropical Diseases (HTD). 3 The LSHTM was founded in 1924, thanks to a generous gift from the Rockefeller Foundation, as a Public Health School that opened officially in 1929; it has never possessed a clinical component but incorporated certain departments (notably protozoology and helminthology) that were based originally at the LSTM and HTD. A clinical service has been maintained at the National Health Service-run HTD and it is this that has a greater right than the LSHTM to be hailed as the direct successor to the LSTM. It is far from clear how Tropical Medicine became incorporated into the title of the LSHTM. 4,5
Incidentally, the origin(s) of Tropical Medicine are clearly set out in the first two chapters of my book, and certainly most of the material in the book cannot be found in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.