A. S. F. Grünbaum, who changed his name to Leyton in 1915, was born in London, the elder son of Joseph Grünbaum, merchant, a naturalised British subject, and his wife Delia Frankau. He was educated at the City of London School and Caius College, Cambridge, and graduated in natural sciences in 1891. He took the degrees of M.B, B.Ch, three years later, having done his clinical training at St. Thomas’s Hospital, and then filled house appointments in that Hospital and the Birmingham General Hospital. In 1896, working in Vienna, he devised the agglutination test for typhoid fever but was forestalled in publication by Widal with whose name the test came to be associated. After returning to England, he became, successively, assistant lecturer on physiology and lecturer on experimental physiology at Liverpool University, and, in 1903, director of the Liverpool Cancer Research Institution; he also lectured at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and acted as assistant physician to the Hospital for Consumption. He delivered the Goulstonian Lectures in 1903. In 1904 he moved to Leeds to become professor of pathology at the University. There he continued his researches on cancer and assumed the additional duties of dean of the Medical School. During the 1914-1918 War, he served, with the rank of major, as bacteriological consultant to Northern Command. Ill health obliged him to resign both his commission and his chair in 1917, but, two years later, he was able to take up the post of director of the clinical laboratory at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. A shy, nervous man, who did not associate with his fellows easily, he concealed his qualities of unselfishness and loyalty behind a mask of cynicism and bluntness. He married in 1909 Helen Gertrude, widow of Robert S. Stewart, M.D, and herself a doctor, and had two sons. His brother was O. F. F. Leyton, F.R.C.P. He died at his home at Great Shelford, Cambridge.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1921; B.M.J., 1921; Nature, 27 Oct. 1921; Al.Cantab., iii, 166]