William Guybon Atherstone

William Guybon Atherstone 27 May 1814 Nottingham, England - 26 March 1898) Grahamstown, Cape Province, medical practitioner, naturalist and geologist, one of the pioneers of South African geology and a member of the Cape Parliament.

He arrived in South Africa with his parents in 1820. His father, Dr John Atherstone, was appointed District Surgeon of Uitenhage in 1822. William, a young man of wide interests and outstanding ability, received his first training at Dr James Rose Innes's academy in Uitenhage, being at first apprenticed to his father and then serving as Assistant-Surgeon in the Sixth Frontier War 1834-1835. In 1836 he studied medicine in Dublin and was admitted as M.R.C.S. the following year, obtaining an M.D. in Heidelberg, Germany in 1839, returning to Grahamstown in the same year and joining his father in practice. He carried out research in lung-sickness, horse-sickness and tick-borne fever and was in 1847 the first surgeon outside Europe and America to perform an amputation using an anaesthetic. In 1839 his interest was aroused in geology, and from that date he devoted the leisure resulting from a long and successful medical career to the pursuit of geological science.

In 1857 he published an account of the rocks and fossils of Uitenhage (the latter described more fully by R Tate, Quart. Journal Geol. Soc., 1867). He also studied many fossil reptilia from the Karroo beds, and sent specimens to the British Museum. These were described by Sir Richard Owen.

Atherstone's identification, in 1867, with the help of Peter MacOwan and HG Galpin, of a crystal found at De Kalk near Hopetown, as a diamond led indirectly to the establishment of the diamond industry of South Africa. He encouraged the workings at Jagersfontein, and he also called attention to the diamandiferous pipe at Kimberley. He was partly responsible for the foundation of the Grahamstown library, botanical garden and, in 1855, the Albany Museum.

He travelled widely in the eastern Cape, Namaqualand and the Transvaal, collecting minerals, fossils, plant specimens and seeds, sending material to Hooker at Kew. He was a friend of Andrew Geddes Bain of pass-building fame. He was made F.R.C.S. in 1863 and F.G.S in 1864. He represented Grahamstown as Member of Parliament from 1881-1883 whence he was elected to the Legislative Council where he served until 1891.

He is commemorated in the genus Atherstonea Pappe and in the names of various fossil reptiles. He was one of the founders of the Geological Society of South Africa at Johannesburg in 1895. He died at Grahamstown, on March 26, 1898.

See the obituary by T Rupert Jones, Natural Science, vol. xiv. January 1899).