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Correspondence to: P M Dunn, Department of Child Health, University of Bristol, Southmead Hospital, Bristol BS10 5NB, UK Correspondence to: Professor Dunn; [email protected]
Leonard Gregory Parsons was born in Kidderminster on 25 November 1879.1,2 His parents, Theophilus and Sarah, came of Worcestershire stock and were staunch Methodists. Leonard grew up in Aston and went to King Edward VI Grammar School, where he shone at sport, particularly rugby and sprinting. In 1896 he studied zoology at Mason College, Birmingham but then turned to medicine, winning a scholarship and qualifying MB, BS (London) in 1903. During the next seven years he worked at the Hospital for Sick Children and at the Brompton in London, and obtained the MRCP and MD (1908). He then practised for a time in Bromsgrove. Already though he was determined to become a paediatrician, still a very neglected area of medicine. In 1908 he married Ethel Mantle, the daughter of a Methodist minister, and they had a son, Clifford, who subsequently became a distinguished paediatric cardiologist, and also a daughter.
In 1910 Parsons was appointed physician to the outpatients of the Birmingham Children's Hospital. Within a short time he had made his mark both as a clinician and researcher, and in 1914 the new post of lecturer in the diseases of children and paediatrics was created for him by the University of Birmingham. The first world war intervened and he saw service as a major in the RAMC in Greece and Serbia for which he received the Serbian Order of St Sara in 1917. Returning to Birmingham Children's Hospital in 1918, Parsons resumed his lecturer duties. In 1923, the year he became FRCP, he gave the Gaulstonian Lecture of the Royal College of Physicians on the wasting diseases of infancy and in 1928 the Ingleby Lectures on rickets and allied disorders.3 The following is an extract:
ON RICKETS3
“ . . . recent advances in our knowledge have shown that rickets is a disorder of calcium and phosphorus salt metabolism, usually the result of defective absorption of these elements from the bowel; further, that this defective absorption is due either to an inefficient supply of these elements, or of some activating body in the tissue fluids; that this body...