John Gordon Harrower

John Gordon Harrower FRSE FRCSE (1890–1936) was a Scottish anatomist. He was an expert on the human skull, and classified many separate Asiatic types.

Harrower was born on 4 April 1890 in Glasgow the son of John Harrower in Langside in the south of the city. He won a scholarship to Allan Glen's School and was educated alongside contemporaries such as John Vernon Harrison. Initially training primarily in mathematics and electricity, in 1910 he obtained a senior post at Glasgow Tramways Power Station, which he retained until 1919.[1]

His interested shifted from electricity to radiology, and he retrained as a physician. He attended night school at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow and graduated MB ChB in 1913 and gained his doctorate in 1918. In 1919 he became a Demonstrator (dissecting bodies in front of students during anatomy lectures) at Glasgow University. In 1922 he was given a professorship to teach anatomy at the Singapore Medical College. In 1925 he was granted his DSc from the University of Edinburgh for his thesis A Study of the Hokien and the Tamil Skull,[2] sampled from coolies originated from Tamil and Southern Fujian in Singapore, became a commonly cited source in Chinese literature as the dimensions of the skulls of "modern Southern Chinese".[3] In 1926 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Thomas Hastie Bryce, Sir John Graham Kerr, Diarmid Noel Paton, and Ralph Stockman.[4]

He died in Singapore on 9 April 1936, a few days after his 46th birthday.[5]

  1. ^ "Reference at www.cambridge.org".
  2. ^ Harrower, John Gordon (1925). A study of the Hokien and the Tamil skull. hdl:1842/34636.
  3. ^ 颜誾 (1972). "大汶口新石器时代人骨的研究报告". 考古学报 (1): 112.
  4. ^ Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0-902-198-84-X. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 January 2013. Retrieved 5 October 2016.
  5. ^ Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser 10 April 1936