Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Pair: Captain J. G. Forbes, Royal Army Medical Corps

British War and Victory Medals (Capt.) mounted as worn, nearly extremely fine (2) £80-100

James Graham Forbes was born in Steeple Claydon, Buckinghamshire on 24 March 1873, the son of the Rev. Edward Forbes. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, 1891-94. He received his medical training at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and graduated as a M.B., B.Ch. in 1898. He gained the M.D. and D.P.H. in 1901. In 1904 he gained the M.R.C.P. and was elected to the Fellowship in 1920. During the early 1900’s he held appointments at the East London Hospital for Children and at the Hospital for Sick Children and at the Metropolitan Hospital and Royal Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. He was for a time a civil surgeon attached to the Royal Horse Guards and in 1902 was Medical Officer to the Anglo-French Boundary Commission in West Africa. Pathology and the origin of children’s diseases were his main specialisation, however in 1911 he was persuaded to became a school doctor under the L.C.C. where his talents were largely wasted. Fortunately he was later employed by the pathological laboratory at County Hall, where he worked on the control of infectious diseases in schools and made a name for himself as an advocate of diphtheria immunisation. He produced a special report on the latter for the Medical Research Council in 1927 and made it a subject of his Milroy Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians in 1929. Forbes was the author of the book, Diphtheria Past & Present: Its Aetiology, Distribution, Transmission and Prevention (1932).

During the Great War he served as a Captain in the R.A.M.C., serving as Pathologist and Sanitary Officer with the 36th General Hospital at Salonika. For his services he was mentioned in despatches (London Gazette 28 November 1917).

Forbes married Muriel Watson in 1905, and had a son and two daughters. His daughter Murial Rosemary Forbes married John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha) in 1938. Dr Forbes died on 8 April 1941. With copied research.