Edward Berdoe

Born in St Pancras, London on 7 March 1836, Berdoe was educated at Regent's Park College,[1] presumably as a lay student rather than a candidate for the Baptist ministry. While working in an apothecary's shop in Reading, he took up photography. There is an Edward Berdoe recorded as serving in a medical capacity during the Crimean War and later in the American Civil War which ended in 1865,[2] but this is likely to be a namesake, as the subject of this article was developing his career in pharmacy and raising a family in England in those periods.[3]

To gain medical qualifications, Berdoe studied at the Royal London Hospital and was admitted as LRCPE (Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh) and LSA (Licentiate of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries) in 1876,[4] followed by the MRCS (Member of the Royal College of Surgeons) the next year. The rest of his life was spent as a general practitioner in Hackney, where he died just before his 80th birthday, on 2 March 1916.[1]

In the 1880s, Berdoe became a prominent student of the works of Robert Browning. He was on the committee of the London Browning Society from its foundation in 1881 to its dissolution in 1894.[5] Over the years he published a series of works to help readers understand the poet's ideas, an example being The Browning Cyclopaedia,[6] which was to be reprinted in England and the United States during the 20th century.

Two aspects of medical practice in his time drew him into campaigning for change in the treatment of patients and animals. One was the use for experiments in teaching hospitals of poor patients, who could not afford private treatment. This he viewed as callous and cruel, and wrote a novel against it under the pseudonym Aesculapius Scalpel[7][8] and a follow-up which exposed the abuses dramatically.[9][1]

An allied subject on which he felt passionately and wrote extensively was animal welfare, in particular vivisection. Here he served as editor of the magazine The Zoophilist, published by what became the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Among other works, he collaborated in 1893 with the Society's founder, Frances Power Cobbe,[1] on an exposé entitled Nine Circles, or The Torture of the Innocent.[10]

In 1858 Berdoe was married in Hastings to Mary Inskipp.[11] They had two sons and four daughters. A lifelong teetotaller and vegetarian, his immersion in the writings of Browning led him to seek greater knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church, which he joined in 1890.[11]

• St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1888)
• The Origin and Growth of the Healing Art (1893)
• The Browning Cyclopædia, A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning (1897)

• Short biography
• Works by Edward Berdoe at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Edward Berdoe at Internet Archive
• Dying scientifically: a key to St. Bernard's (1888) at the Internet Archive
• WorldCat, retrieved 30 September 2016