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copied from David Miller https://www.physoc.org/magazine-articles/seventy-years-on/
Sir Charles Arthur Lovatt Evans was born in 1884 in Birmingham. His unusual education and early career was gained in part as a technician and then as a lecturer at two colleges in Birmingham. Offered a scholarship by Ernest Starling, he worked at UCL from 1910. Medical training followed and then war work, together with Starling, on the challenges posed by gas warfare. He investigated the effects of arsine, phosgene, hydrocyanic acid, and mustard gas, as well as respirator efficacy. His rise in physiology was meteoric. In 1918, he was made professor at the University of Leeds, but 1 year later moved to London at the National Institute for Medical Research, Hampstead; from there he went to the Chair of Physiology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital (1922) and last to the Jodrell Chair of Physiology in UCL (1926).
His predecessors, Starling and AV Hill, were still at UCL and he collaborated with both. With Starling, he investigated the metabolism of the heart and lungs and the role of lactic acid in muscle metabolism. He published on cardiac, voluntary, and smooth muscle in relation to lactic acid and heat production. This work developed the “heart oxygenator” preparation, insights that laid the foundations for open-chest surgery. After retirement in 1949 he researched anticholinesterases, analysing how they affected respiration by bronchoconstriction, neuromuscular block, and central respiratory failure. He showed that sweating in the horse is controlled by circulating adrenaline rather than by nerves. His last published paper was on the toxicity of hydrogen sulphide, work done at the age of 83.
Lovatt Evans was among the first physiologists to recognise the importance of the then new subject of biochemistry, being a founder member of the Biochemical Society. Another major contribution was in editing and writing highly respected and influential textbooks (e.g. 14 editions 1930–58 of Starling’s Principles of Human Physiology, and authoring 4 editions of Recent Advances in Physiology). He was universally regarded as an inspirational leader with the prized ability to help people find their own way largely independently. He made major managerial contributions to the work of the Medical Research Council and in re-establishing UCL after World War 2. Knighted in 1951, Lovatt Evans died in 1968.