Alfred William Alcock
British military physician and carcinologist (1859–1933)
Alfred William Alcock (23 June 1859 – 24 March 1933) was a British physician, naturalist, and carcinologist.
Early life and education
Alcock was the son of a sea-captain, John Alcock in Bombay, India who retired to live in Blackheath. His mother was a daughter of Christopher Puddicombe, the only son of a Devon squire.
Alcock studied at Mill Hill School, at Blackheath Proprietary School and at Westminster School. In 1876 his father faced financial losses and he was taken out of school and sent to India in the Wynaad district. Here he was taken care of by relatives engaged in coffee-planting. As a boy of 17 he spent time in the jungles of Malabar.
Career
Coffee-planting in Wynaad declined and Alcock obtained a post at a commission agent's office in Calcutta. This office closed soon, and he worked from 1878 to 1880 in Purulia as an agent recruiting unskilled labourers for the Assam tea gardens. While here an acquaintance, Duncan Cameron, left him a Macmillan book by Michael Foster Physiology Primer.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alfred William Alcock” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.