Godfrey Howitt

Education

Godfrey was educated at Mansfield and tutored by his brother William before graduating from Edinburgh University Medical School with an Doctor of Medicine in 1830.

Career

He practised medicine in Leicester and in Nottingham was honorary physician at both the City Infirmary and the General Hospital. Howitt erected a prefabricated wooden house he had brought with him and shortly after arriving began work at the Melbourne Hospital. Howitt continued to work and by 1845 he had extensive lands which covered a number of streets, a large garden, fields near Yea and a farm in Caulfield.

Howitt was made president and honorary physician of the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum in 1847.

In the October he also played host to two other Pre-Raphaelites, Thomas Woolner and Bernard Smith, before they set out to the gold-rush diggings. Woolner and Smith stayed in Australia for a number of years, eventually returning to England whilst Edward and Alfred stayed.

Alfred became a significant figure in the developing colony through his contributions to literature, administration and exploration, whilst Edward applied himself to landscape design. In Victoria, Ferdinand von Mueller named the monotypic genus Howittia, an Australian blue-flowered mallow he had found in 1855 after Godfrey, "in acknowledgement of his devotion to botany".

To the University of Melbourne he left one thousand pounds for scholarships, books on botany and his entomological collection.

Achievements

• He was a founder of the University of Melbourne Medical School in 1858.

Membership

From 1853 to 1871 Godfrey was a member of the University of Melbourne"s council and on the Medical School Committee. He was also the first vice-president of the Philosophical Society of Victoria in 1854, Treasurer and Vice President of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria in 1855 and 1856 respectively and a founding member of the Royal Society of Victoria, its successor from 1859 to 1868. He helped to found the Entomological Society of London, was a member of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh and in 1839 published The Nottinghamshire Flora.