Frederic Wood Jones, as professor of anatomy in 1920s, lifts Adelaide University and state's knowledge of nature
Professor Frederic Wood Jones was commissioned to write The Mammals of South Australia handbook in 1923-25.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australi
Frederic Wood Jones’s decade (1920-30) as professor of anatomy at Adelaide University produced a worthwhile contribution to the university and South Australia’s natural knowledge and attitudes.
Wood Jones graduated from London University (BSc 1903; MB, BSc 1904; DSc 1910), linked to London Hospital Medical College, and in 1904 became a member (later fellow) of the Royal College of Surgeons. At university, he began a life friendship with anatomist Arthur Keith.
Wood Jones pursued his primary love of biology as medical officer to the Eastern Extension Telegraph Co. on the Cocos-Keeling Islands and time for natural history studies earned him a doctorate, published as Coral and Atolls. He also joined the archaeological survey of Nubia, made urgent because the Aswan Dam flooding.
Wood Jones taught anatomy at the medical schools of the London, St Thomas's and the Royal Free hospitals, and at Manchester University. His Arris and Gale lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons were the nucleus of Arboreal Man (1916) on one of his central interests: the evolution of man. In 1918, he joined the royal army medical corps and at the special military surgical hospital in London he presented lectures that based anatomical masterpiece The Principles of Anatomy as Seen in the Hand (1920).
On Arthur Keith’s recommendation, Wood Jones was offered the Elder chair of anatomy at Adelaide University in 1919. He started in 1920 in cramped quarters without adequate technical assistance or anatomical specimens.
With energy, and skill in presenting a case, he persuaded the university to build him a 200-seat lecture theatre and give him a skilled technician to assemble a museum. Wood Jones’s lectures were acclaimed for their enthusiasm, absorbing interest, wit, clarity and superb blackboard illustrations.
The South Australian appointment had attracted him because of time to study native fauna. All his vacations, and spare money, were spent on excursions to the inland and islands. He was active in the Royal Society of South Australia and the first of his many articles in its Transactions was published in 1920. Later he was commissioned to write The Mammals of South Australia, with his own drawings and published in three parts (1923-25). He also published Unscientific Essays and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1925.
Wood Jones was a prime mover in 1926 in founding the Anthropological Society of South Australia. He liked and admired the Aboriginals and was appalled by their detribalised conditions and public indifference. He tried to arouse public awareness of the problem in Adelaide.
In 1920, Wood Jones, as Adelaide's delegate to the Pan-Pacific Scientific Congress in Honolulu, entered a wider anthropological community, and in 1927 accepted the Rockefeller chair of physical anthropology at the University of Hawaii. There he wrote The Matrix of the Mind with psychologist S.D. Porteus and Man's Place Among the Mammal.
Missing teaching, Wood Jones was easily persuaded to accept the chair of anatomy at Melbourne University in 1930. A drop in salary was overcome by several Melbourne citizens, mostly medical practitioners, guaranteed an additional £200 a year.
