Edgar Pask
British anaesthetist (1912–1966)
Edgar Alexander Pask (4 September 1912 – 30 May 1966) was a British anaesthetist and experimental physiologist. His academic career was spent at the University of Durham (Newcastle upon Tyne site), where he was reader in anaesthetics (1947–49) and then held a chair from 1949 until his death. He was the second professor of anaesthetics in the UK. He also headed the anaesthetics department at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle.
Early life, education and early career
Pask was born on 4 September 1912, to Mary (née Speedie) and Percy Pask. His birthplace is variously given as Derby and West Kirby, then in Cheshire. His father was in the fruit import–export business in Cheshire, having risen from being a Liverpool barrow boy. His mother, a committed Methodist, was from the Isle of Man, and the family moved there after June 1928. Pask had two brothers; his elder brother (Alfred) became a Methodist minister, and his younger brother was the well-known cybernetics researcher, Gordon Pask.
Pask attended Rydal School, a Methodist boarding school in North Wales, and then read natural sciences at Downing College, Cambridge, graduating in 1934. He gained his MB BChir (1937) at the London Hospital (now the Royal London Hospital), where he continued to work until moving to Oxford, at first as an anaesthetist at the Radcliffe Infirmary and from 1939 or early 1940, at the Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics as junior assistant under Robert Macintosh.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edgar Pask” 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.