Walter Gawen King (December 4, 1851 – April 4, 1935) qualified for MB&CM (= MBBS) degree from Aberdeen in 1873 and entered Indian Medical Service (IMS) as Surgeon in 1874. He qualified for DPH in 1888, became a Colonel in 1905, and retired in 1910. After two years of military service, he worked as Civil Surgeon in different hospitals in Madras Presidency, held the post of Professor of Physics (Madras Presidency College) and hygiene (Madras Medical College), and those of Madras City Special Sanitary Officer, Mandalay Central Jail Superintendent (Burma), Madras Government Lunatic Asylum Superintendent, and Madras Deputy Sanitary Commissioner. In 1894, he was the Sanitary Commissioner of Madras Presidency. He worked for relief during the Great Madras Famine (1876–1877), and 20 years later, in a subsequent famine, when he was the Sanitary Commissioner. He rejoined service during the war, and later was a consultant at the Tropical Diseases Clinic and lecturer in Tropical Hygiene at the King’s College, London. He wrote a few books — Cultivation of Animal Vaccine (1891), Plague Inspector’s Manual (1902) and Sanitary Rules for the Prevention of Plague in Municipalities (1903). A smallpox-vaccine depot functioning from November 7, 1899 was elevated to a provincial public-health testing laboratory in Madras in 1903 and was renamed as the King Institute of Preventive Medicine (KIPM) after Walter Gawen King. KIPM manufactured lymph vaccine for the first time in India. KIPM has grown today into a multi-department institute producing different vaccines and offering a host of other medical services.
In a note published in the British Medical Journal (1922), Walter King says: “The Madras Government was thus the first in the tropics to require compulsory technical training of sanitary inspectors. That the training afforded is efficient may be judged without my taxing your space with details. I may state that the general educational standard for admission to the course is the matriculation examination of the Madras University, which is equivalent to the FA (First in Arts) of the Calcutta University. Assistant sanitary inspectors attend courses of physiology, bacteriological demonstrations, and theoretical hygiene, under the professors of the Madras Medical College, and practical hygiene under selected sanitary officers.” This quotation speaks highly of the quality of education in Madras and the efforts the Madras government made to ensure quality in public-health management. Another King, also a medical practitioner, Henry King, working in Madras, published the Madras Manual of Hygiene in 1875, which covered a range of public-health issues. I am not sure whether the two Kings were related to each other in some way. Allan Ewan Grant revised King’s Madras Manual of Hygiene and published it as Indian Manual of Hygiene (by Surgeon–Captain A E Grant, M.B., Professor of Hygiene, Madras Medical College, 8vo, 443 pages, Higginbottom & Co., Madras). Both the King (1975) and Grant (1894) editions covered a range of health and hygiene information appropriate to tropics: from house designs to ventilation, nutrition, and the modern sewerage system and referred to the best European practices of sanitary engineering and public hygiene. The 1875 and 1894 editions neatly spanned over the two decades in which Louis Pasteur (1822—1895) had proposed the germ theory.
Grant of IMS cadre started as Second Physician at the General Hospital and Professor of Hygiene in Madras Medical College in 1890. While revising King’s Madras Manual, he contemplated two volumes; whereas the first was published, the second exists as manuscript, due to his premature death at the age of 41. He held jobs in Madras for 10 years, where he was regarded as an accomplished physician and a scientific hygienist.
