Howard Marsh (surgeon)

Marsh was born in 1839[3] in a small village in eastern England, near Bungay, on the Suffolk / Norfolk border.[1] His father, Edward Brunning Marsh,[4] is described as a "gentleman farmer",[3] of Homersfield, on the Waveney, Suffolk. His mother Maria, née Haward, daughter of Charles and Maria,[5] came from Brook, near Norwich.[4] The Marsh family was 'old-established East Anglian farming stock', originally from Eye.[6]

He studied at St Bartholomew's Hospital ("Bart's") in London, where he signed on in December 1858, becoming a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in June 1861.[7] He was appointed house surgeon at the hospital in 1862, working under Frederic Skey.[7] He obtained his F.R.C.S. diploma in 1866 and in 1868 was appointed Administrator of Chloroform.[7] He held a succession of progressively more senior appointments as assistant surgeon before eventually becoming a full surgeon in 1891.[3] By this time he had already, since 1868, worked as a surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street (as it was then known) where he became full surgeon in 1879 and consulting surgeon in 1888.[7] Also in the late 1860s Marsh became surgeon to the Queen Square House of Relief for Children with Chronic Disease of the Joints,[3] an establishment founded "in great part through the exertions of Miss Perceval".[7] Howard Marsh married Jane Perceval, daughter of Spencer Perceval, and the grand daughter of an assassinated British prime minister, in 1870.[8]

In 1903 Marsh was appointed Professor of Surgery at Cambridge University[1] in belated succession to Sir George Murray Humphry (who had died in 1896).[3] Marsh resigned from his post at Bart's and relocated to Cambridge, becoming a fellow of King's College.[1] Four years later he relocated again, half a mile to the south, becoming Master of Downing College, Cambridge.[2]

As Master of Downing College Marsh resisted government pressure to restrict access for students from India, then an important British Colony.[2] Approximately one third of all Indian students attending Cambridge University during the early years of the twentieth century chose Downing College: Marsh attributed this to the college's reputation for excellent teaching of law, a subject favoured by India's burgeoning mercantile classes.[2] Government pressure was part of a wider political strategy to limit anti-colonial activism in British universities.[2] After consulting with fellow members of the college governing body Marsh politely rejected the British minister's request to restrict admissions in a way which would have been "a rebuff to Indian students".[2]

Marsh was father to the polymath Edward Marsh and father-in-law of the controversial general and writer, Frederick Barton Maurice. A grand daughter was the economist Joan Robinson.