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William Edmund Cooke

Fellow

William Edmund Cooke was born in Aspull in 1881, the son of physician Luther Cooke. He graduated MD from the University of Liverpool in 1914 and later undertook epidemiological research in India and China. Cooke became Medical Superintendent of the Ochil Hills Sanatorium and was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1917. He served with the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War and later organised a pathological service at the Royal Infirmary of Wigan, where he identified asbestos bodies, contributing to the recognition of asbestosis as an occupational disease. He died in 1939.