Henry Wentworth Acland

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Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, 1st Baronet (23 August 1815 – 16 October 1900) was an English physician and educator.

Henry Acland was born near Exeter, the fourth son of Sir Thomas Acland (1787–1871). Educated at Harrow and at Christ Church, Oxford, he was elected fellow of All Souls in 1840, and then studied medicine in London and Edinburgh. Returning to Oxford, he was appointed Lee's reader in anatomy at Christ Church in 1845, and in 1851 Radcliffe librarian and physician to the Radcliffe Infirmary.

Seven years later he became Regius professor of medicine, a post which he retained till 1894. He was also a curator of the university galleries and of the Bodleian Library, and from 1858 to 1887 he represented his university on the General Medical Council, of which he served as president from 1874 to 1887. He was created a baronet in 1890, and ten years later he died at his house in Broad Street, Oxford (number 40 on the site of the new Bodleian Library building).

Acland took a leading part in the revival of the Oxford medical school and in introducing the study of natural science into the university. As Lee's reader he began to form a collection of anatomical and physiological preparations on the plan of John Hunter, and the establishment of the Oxford University Museum, opened in 1861, as a centre for the encouragement of the study of science, especially in relation to medicine, was largely due to his efforts. "To Henry Acland," said his lifelong friend, John Ruskin, "physiology was an entrusted gospel of which he was the solitary preacher to the heathen," but on the other hand his thorough classical training preserved science at Oxford from too abrupt a severance from the humanities. In conjunction with Dean Liddell, he revolutionized the study of art and archaeology, so that the cultivation of these subjects, for which, as Ruskin declared, no one at Oxford cared before that time, began to flourish in the university.

Acland was also interested in questions of public health. He served on the royal commission on sanitary laws in England and Wales in 1869, and published a study of the outbreak of cholera at Oxford in 1854, together with various pamphlets on sanitary matters. His memoir on the topography of the Troad, with panoramic plan (1839), was among the fruits of a cruise which he made in the Mediterranean for the sake of his health.

His daughter subsequently lived in Park Town and was an early pioneer of colour photography. Some of her photographs are in collection of the Museum of the History of Science in Broad Street, opposite the family home.

His son, Colonel Alfred Dyke Acland married Hon. Beatrice Danvers Smith, daughter of Rt. Hon. W. H. Smith of the Newsagents dynasty on 30 July 1885 and gained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in 1910 in the service of the Royal 1st Devon Yeomanry (Territorial Army).

The old Acland Hospital on the Banbury Road in Oxford (now part of Keble College) was named after Henry Acland.