Joseph Barcroft

Who was Joseph Barcroft?

Sir Joseph Barcroft CBE, FRS was a British physiologist best known for his studies of the oxygenation of blood.

Born in Newry, County Down into a Quaker family, he was the son of Henry Barcroft DL and Anna Richardson Malcomson of The Glen, Newry – a property purchased for his parents by his mother's uncle, John Grubb Richardson and adjoining his own estate in Bessbrook. He was initially educated at Bootham School, York and later at The Leys School, Cambridge. Sir Joseph, knighted in 1935, married Mary Agnetta Ball, daughter of Sir Robert S. Ball, in 1903.

He received his degree in Medicine and Science in 1896 from Cambridge University, and immediately began his studies of haemoglobin. In May 1910 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and would be awarded their Royal Medal in 1922 and their Copley medal in 1943. He would also deliver their Croonian Lecture in 1935.

In 1936 he was nominated, unsuccessfully, by Professor Arthur Dighton Stammers, Professor of Physiology in the University of the Witwatersrand, for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for his work on the respiratory function of the blood and the functions of the spleen.