Dame Sheila Sherlock: pioneer in liver diseases

Within living memory of some of us, liver disease was a Cinderella subject. If you look up the first edition of the standard medical textbook of the time, Sir William Osler's 'Principles and Practice of Medicine', published in 1892, you will find a mere 24 of its 1079 pages devoted to the liver, compared with 38 pages on typhoid fever alone; and matters hardly changed throughout the first half of the 20th century. Although 'cirrhosis' and 'hepatitis' were well recognised conditions when I was a house surgeon in 1948, their classification, aetiologies, detailed pathology and management were little understood, while laboratory investigations of the liver diseases were few and non-specific.