Thomas Wingate Todd was born on January 15, 1885 to James and Katharine Todd. Todd began his education at the local school in Sheffield, England. He then attended Nottingham High School under private tuition. After high school he attended Manchester University where he graduated in 1907 with an M.B and Ch.B. degree. After graduating the University, Todd obtained a position on the medical faculty. He was mainly responsible for anatomy demonstrations and lectures. During this period he also served on the staffs on various hospitals in England and Scotland. While at the University of Manchester, Todd organized courses in clinical anatomy and a new curriculum for students studying dentistry. He established a degree in dental science, as well as an anatomy course for art students and a neurology course for psychology students.
Todd published many papers, including papers on the subjects of interrelations between the human skeleton and the nervous system. Todd worked hand in hand with Sir Arthur Keith and Sir Grafton Elliot Smith. He was responsible for cataloguing and arranging the skeletons that Smith found in Egypt. He had extensive experience in working with skeletons and skeletal dating.
Todd married Miss Eleanor Pearson in the year 1912. They had three children, Arthur, Donald, and Eleanor Margaret. In that same year he was appointed the Henry Wilson Payne Professor of Anatomy at Western Reserve and he and his wife were relocated to the United States. Todd remained at this position for the remainder of his life. While there he added quite an impressive list of accomplishments and honors. He was the director of the university's Hamann Museum of Comparative Anthropology and Anatomy and helped to develop one of the largest collections of human and mammal skeletons in the world.
He did extensive research in areas such as, the structure and development of bone, the growth of children, the growth of the brain, the nature of mummification, age relationships, periods of fertility in women, and many other things. Because of his research, Todd was asked to estimate the age of King Tutankhamen, better known as King Tut, and the King and Queen of Ur of the Chaldees. Not only did Todd manage to find time to write and publish hundreds of papers in medical journals, he also wrote “The Clinical Anatomy of the Gastro-Intestinal Tract”, “The Estimation of Cranial Capacity”, “Skeletal Adjustment in Jaw Growth”, “Behavior Patterns of the Alimentary Tract”, and “Atlas of Skeletal Maturation”.
Thomas Wingate Todd died on December 28, 1938.
References:
H.L. Shapiro. “Thomas Wingate Todd.” American Anthropologist 41 (1939): 458-461.
Kaufman, Martin. “Todd, Thomas Wingate.” Dictionary of American Medical Biography 2 (1984): 747-748.
“Todd, Thomas Wingate.” The National Cyclopedia of American Biography 38 (1953): 639.
Written by Megan McWaters
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007