Hodgkin family


The Hodgkin family is a British Quaker family where several members have excelled in science, medicine, and arts.
The first famous member of the family was the grammarian and calligrapher John Hodgkin. His descendants include the physician Thomas Hodgkin, the historian Thomas Hodgkin, and Nobel laureate physiologist Alan Hodgkin.

Family tree

For clarity, the tree does not include every family member. It is focused on the most prominent members and their direct ancestors and descendants, as well as those who, by marriage, connect the family to other prominent families or individuals.

The first generation: John Hodgkin

John Hodgkin was an English tutor, grammarian, and calligrapher. He married Elizabeth Rickman of a Sussex Quaker family and together they had four sons of whom the first two died in infancy

The second generation

Thomas Hodgkin (physician)

Thomas Hodgkin, or "Uncle Doctor" as he was known to succeeding generations, was a British physician, considered one of the most prominent pathologists of his time and a pioneer in preventive medicine. Hodgkin's lymphoma is named after him.
In 1850 he married Sarah Frances Scaife, a widow, but the couple had no children.

John Hodgkin

John Hodgkin was an English barrister and Quaker preacher. He was married three times. From his first marriage to Elizabeth Howard he had five children, including the historian Thomas Hodgkin

The third generation

Because John Hodgkin's first two sons died in infancy, and Thomas Hodgkin had no children, all members of the third generation were children of the younger John Hodgkin.

Thomas Hodgkin (historian)

Thomas Hodgkin was a British historian and biographer. He is particularly known for his 8-volume magnum opus Italy and her Invaders. He married Lucy Ann Fox, daughter of Alfred Fox and had seven children with her. These include the historian Robert Howard Hodgkin and George Hodgkin, father to Nobel Laureate Alan Hodgkin.

The fourth generation

Robert Howard Hodgkin

Robert Howard Hodgkin was an English historian of modern history and Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford. He was married to Dorothy Forster Smith, daughter of fellow Oxford historian Arthur Smith and together they had a son, Thomas Lionel Hodgkin.

Henry Theodore Hodgkin

Henry Hodgkin, son of John Hodgkin's son Jonathan Backhouse Hodgkin, was a medical doctor and a British Quaker missionary who, in the course of his 55-year life, co-founded the West China Union University in Chengdu, co-founded and led the first Christian pacifist movement, the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, and founded the Pendle Hill Quaker meeting and training center, in Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

The fifth generation

Eliot Hodgkin

Eliot Hodgkin was an English painter, son of Charles Ernest Hodgkin
, grandson of the engineer and antiquary John Eliot Hodgkin, and great-grandson of John Hodgkin. In 1940 he married Maria Clara Egle Laura Henderson and together they had one son and three grandchildren.

Thomas Lionel Hodgkin

Thomas Lionel Hodgkin was an English Marxist historian of Africa. He was the son of Robert Howard Hodgkin and Dorothy Forster Smith, daughter of the historian Arthur Lionel Smith. In 1937, he married the British chemist Dorothy Crowfoot who, under the name Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.

Alan Hodgkin

Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin was an English physiologist and biophysicist, who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Huxley and John Eccles. He married Marion Rous in 1944, daughter of American pathologist Francis Peyton Rous, who won the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Their son Jonathan Hodgkin became a molecular biologist at Cambridge University.

Ernest Pease Hodgkin

Ernest Pease Hodgkin was a renowned medical entomologist and marine biologist. Born in Madagascar as a descendant of the Pease family he studied malarial transmission in Malaysia, was a prisoner of war in Changi prison, and became the foremost expert on Western Australian river ecology and founded many of the Australian Quaker meeting houses and schools.

The sixth generation

Howard Hodgkin

Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin CH CBE was a British painter.

Joanna Hodgkin

Joanna Hodgkin is a British novelist known primarily for mysteries who has published under both her maiden name Joanna Hodgkin and her married name Joanna Hines. She is also the biographer of her mother, Nancy Isobel Myers, who was the much-abused first wife of the writer Lawrence Durrell.

Jonathan Hodgkin

Jonathan Alan Hodgkin is a British biochemist, Professor of Genetics at the University of Oxford, and an emeritus fellow of Keble College, Oxford.