Joseph Harold Sheldon CBE FRCP (27 September 1893 - 22 June 1972) was a British physician, surgeon, and gerontologist.
[3][4] After education at Bancroft's, a Drapers’ Company School at Woodford, J. Harold Sheldon went to work at the secretarial department of Lloyds Bank.
As he approached the age of twenty, he became fervently religious and decided to leave Lloyds Bank and become a Christian medical missionary.
[4] When he had completed only one year of his clinical studies, he joined the Navy as a Surgeon Probationer, as it was possible to do in the first world war, and saw service in a sloop, HMS Wistaria, in the Mediterranean.
[4]Sheldon's Wolverhampton community survey of elderly people, the first of its kind after the war, was carried out at the behest of the Nuffield Foundation, chaired by Seebohm Rowntree.
[5] In 1949 under the auspices of the Royal College of Physicians, he gave the F. E. Williams Lecture on the role of the aged in modern society.
A keen ornithologist and photographer, he combined the two hobbies for a time to study the flight of birds, how they dived and the stability of some of them when asleep standing on one leg.
He published in British Birds his observations over a number of years on the movements of the Northern golden plover while on migration through South Staffordshire.