Frederick Akbar Mahomed

Frederick Henry Horatio Akbar Mahomed (11 April 1849 – 22 November 1884) was an internationally known British physician from Brighton, England.

He was also the grandson of the pioneering Indian traveller, author and entrepreneur Sake Dean Mahomed who was born in the city of Patna.

[2] Cameron and Hicks[2] dispute the suggestion that he ran Turkish baths at Brighton[3] attributing this to a confusion of Mahomed's father Frederick with his uncle, Arthur.

In 1874 Mahomed became a member of the Royal College of Physicians and was appointed as Student Tutor and Pathologist at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington.

In the same year, he was appointed Assistant Physician at Guy's Hospital and, in 1882, he was appointed as a Demonstrator in Morbid Anatomy at Guy's Hospital.Mahomed‘s earliest contribution, while still a medical student, was to improve the sphygmograph, a device for measuring blood pressure that had originally been devised by Karl von Vierordt and further developed by Étienne-Jules Marey.

Mahomed’s major innovation was to make the sphygmograph quantitative, so that it was able to measure arterial blood pressure (in Troy ounces).

[14] Following his graduation in the same year, Mahomed took up an appointment at the Central London Sick Asylum, where he worked with Sir William Broadbent, who became a strong supporter and friend.

[15] Mahomed used the new sphygmograph to measure arterial tension (blood pressure) in Bright's disease and a range of other conditions, including pregnancy, scarlet fever, gout, alcohol and lead poisoning.

[16] He found that in some individuals blood pressure was elevated before there was evidence of kidney disease, assessed by measurement of protein in the urine (proteinuria).

[17] He wrote to the British Medical Journal to advocate undertaking the comprehensive systematic documentation of disease in Britain; he termed this idea, Collective Investigation.

Around this time Mahomed became acquainted with the British polymath, Francis Galton, who shared an interest in factors predisposing to disease.

Their preliminary findings were published in 1883 as a 76-page single volume called 'The Collective Investigation Record' and included results based on more than 2000 patients.

[17] Over the subsequent 5 years data based on over 300 family records were published, with the main findings summarised in Galton’s book, Natural Inheritance.

He described the constitutional basis and natural history of essential hypertension and pointed out that this disease could terminate with nephrosclerosis and renal failure.