Leonard Gregory Parsons, Professor of Paediatrics at Birmingham University and dean of the University's medical school, was born on 25 November 1879 in Kidderminster, the eldest child of Theophilus Lessey Parsons and Sarah Ann Parsons (nee Sharpe). The family were experienced and entrepreneurial farmers, and committed Wesleyans.

After recovering from a serious accident in childhood, Leonard Parsons was educated at King Edward's Grammar School, Aston (1891-96) and then at the Birmingham Mason Science College, studying first zoology and then medicine. He gained a succession of medical degrees and awards, including the MD and MRCP by 1909 and FRCP in 1923. Posts at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children and at the Birmingham Children's Hospital facilitated the development of expertise in paediatrics. After service in the RAMC in the First World War he resumed lecturing in paediatrics in Birmingham and was greatly involved in the establishment of the medical school, becoming its dean in 1941. His Diseases of Infancy and Childhood (1933), coauthored with Seymour Barling, became the standard textbook on the subject. He pioneered research in child nutrition, coeliac disease, rickets, and the treatment of rickets with synthetic ascorbic acid, and, in a team including his cousin Dr Evelyn Marion Hickmans, haemolytic anaemias in chlidhood. Parsons was knighted in 1946 and elected FRS in 1948. He died on 17 December 1950.

Leonard Parsons married Ethel May Mantle (1885-1955) at Catford Wesleyan Church, Lewisham, on 30 April 1908. Ethel was the daughter of John Gregory Mantle (1852-1925), Wesleyan minister. Their son Clifford Gregory Parsons (1909-92), educated at The Leys School and Jesus College, Cambridge, was also a distinguished paediatrician, specialising in children's heart diseases and malfunctions. Like his father, Clifford Parsons was an active member of Four Oaks Methodist Church, Sutton Coldfield, and he died while ayyending a Men's Fellowship there on 19 December 1992.

Leonard Parsons' eldest sibling, Emily Gertrude Parsons (1881-1971), educated at King Edward VI School for Girls, Aston, and Newnham College, Cambridge, served as Principal of the Methodist Girls' School in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka). She married in 1908 the Wesleyan minister Arthur Ernest Kilner Brown (1883-1952).

Entry written by: DHR
Category: Person
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