Obituary - Dr. Barbara Duncum (1910-2001)

Barbara Mary Pycraft was born on 22 February 1910. Her father, William Pycraft, was an ornithologist on the staff of the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, and the author of several books. After reading history at London University she was appointed research assistant at the Wellcome Medical History Museum in the spring of 1931. Her first work involved the classifying of items of folk lore, amulets and suchlike, after which she worked on the history of cinchona, for which she had to learn a modicum of Spanish, and from this she passed to descriptions of native medical procedures. In the course of this work she became experienced in researching aspects of the history of medicine, and in 1936 she was charged with organizing and running a journal-abstracting service covering the main fields of interest to the Museum.

In 1938 she was asked to produce a brief history of anaesthesia for a book that Professor Robert Macintosh, director of the newly established Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics, Oxford, was writing. She researched the subject, and prepared the material to such good effect that she was offered the appointment of historical researcher to the Department, with the suggestion that her researches should form the basis of a D. Phil. thesis. The outbreak of war in September 1939 put an additional load of administrative work on her, so her research had to be done in the Bodleian and the Radcliffe Science Library in the evenings. At about this time she married Philip Duncum, an Oxford graduate, who was working as a journalist on the Oxford Mail and Times.

Barbara obtained her D. Phil. in 1945, and immediately set about rewriting and augmenting her thesis to make it suitable for publication. She was offered employment with the Nuffield Foundation, so the Duncums moved to London, where Philip continued his work in journalism, and Barbara researched in the major scientific libraries. Sponsorship of the book was undertaken by the Wellcome Institute of Medical Research, and it was published by the Oxford University Press in 1947. It attained its status as the classic and authoritative history of inhalation anaesthesia, and as a classic in the history of medicine also, without advertising, and purely on its merits, by word of mouth and the frequency of citation. Its published price was £1-17-6, and by the early 1990s much-sought-after secondhand copies were costing more than fifty times as much. It was reprinted by the History of Anaesthesia Society in 1994, to her great pleasure.

At the Nuffield Foundation Dr. Duncum researched the history of hospital architecture for a book on hospital planning, wrote reports, speeches for the Director, and undertook general administrative duties. She retired in the late 1970s, but found herself in the limelight when, with the founding of the History of Anaesthesia Society, she was elected with acclaim as one of the first group of honorary members, a distinction that united her again with her erstwhile chief, now Sir Robert Macintosh.

Travelling became a problem, but she attended regularly at meetings in London, and contributed papers, her last being at the Joint Sesquicentennial Meeting with the Section of Anaesthetics of the Royal Society of Medicine in December 1994, when she spoke, with much new information, about the reintroduction of nitrous oxide in the 1860s.

She died on 16 October 2001, after a short illness, at the age of 91. She is survived by her husband of 61 years of married happiness, and her sister, Mrs. Margaret Frost. The History of Anaesthesia Society, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, were represented at her funeral, at Putney Vale Crematorium, on 2 November.

David Zuck, M.D.