Murray, George Redmayne (1865–1939), physician, was born at Newcastle upon Tyne on 20 June 1865, the eldest son of William Murray (1839–1920), a physician, and his wife, Frances Mary (d. in or before 1885), daughter of Giles Redmayne. Murray was educated at Eton College and, from 1883, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1886 with first-class honours in part one of the natural sciences tripos. He then joined a group of Cambridge medical students who had been attracted to University College Hospital, London, by the teaching of Sydney Ringer and Victor Horsley. He won the Fellowes junior clinical silver and the senior clinical gold medals, and passed his final examinations in 1888. He graduated MB in 1889, and obtained the MD in 1896. He envisaged a career in experimental medicine, and between 1889 and 1890 he visited medical clinics in Berlin and Paris, carrying letters of introduction from Horsley. He returned to Newcastle in 1891, and worked there as pathologist to the Hospital for Sick Children, and was lecturer in bacteriology and comparative pathology in the University of Durham College of Medicine. While in that post, and at the early age of twenty-six, Murray made the discovery that brought him fame.

Murray devised an effective treatment for myxoedema, which is due to deficiency of thyroid hormone, by the injection of an extract of sheep thyroid. This was the first example of successful hormone replacement therapy, and reduced the scepticism towards organotherapy in Great Britain. Horsley was a member of the committee set up by the London Clinical Society in 1882 to investigate myxoedema and other diseases in which defective thyroid function was suspected. It reported in 1888. In February 1890 Horsley suggested animal thyroid grafts for the treatment of myxoedema. Murray and Horsley corresponded about treatment, and in December 1890 Horsley noted that injection of thyroid extract could do no harm. Murray said that his idea of injecting thyroid extracts came from hearing about successful therapy of a human with a sheep thyroid graft, and the suggestion that the rapid improvement following the graft was due to simple absorption of the juice of the sheep's thyroid gland by the tissues of the patient. Murray's writings give no indication that he was aware of the attempts of C.-E. Brown-Sequard in Paris to rejuvenate old men by the injection of testicular extracts, or the British Medical Journal's sceptical note in 1889 on ‘the pentacle of rejuvenescence’.

In February 1891 Murray showed a patient with myxoedema at a meeting of the Northumberland and Durham Medical Society in Newcastle, and suggested that ‘it would be worthwhile to try the hypodermic injection of an emulsion or extract of the thyroid gland of the sheep’. He obtained permission from the patient, and at the October meeting he showed her greatly improved after six months' treatment. These findings were published in the British Medical Journal in 1891 as were further cases in 1892. The effectiveness of the treatment was rapidly confirmed. Hector W. G. Mackenzie and E. L. Fox separately introduced oral treatment in 1892, and Murray's first patient was then treated with oral thyroid extracts for many years. The minute book of the British Medical Association notes a grant of £15 for the year 1893–4 for studying thyroidectomy in animals.

Murray married, in 1892, Annie Katharine, daughter of Edward Robert Bickersteth, a well-known Liverpool surgeon, a cousin of Edward Bickersteth (1814–1892), dean of Lichfield, and of Robert Bickersteth, bishop of Ripon (1816–1884). They had three sons, two of whom were killed in the First World War, and a daughter.

With his reputation established, Murray was appointed Heath professor of comparative pathology at Durham in 1893, and physician to the Royal Victoria Infirmary at Newcastle in 1898. In 1908 he was appointed professor of systematic medicine at Manchester University, which carried with it the post of physician to the Manchester Royal Infirmary. The choice of Murray for the vacant post raised a storm of local opposition, which his friendliness and competence overcame. However, he did not return to experimental medicine, but occupied himself in teaching, medical practice, and university administration. He retired in 1925.

Murray received many honours. He was Goulstonian (1899) and Bradshaw (1905) lecturer to the Royal College of Physicians, and on the council (1914–17), member of the Medical Research Committee (1916–18), which later became the Medical Research Council, and president of the Association of Physicians in 1936. Honorary degrees were conferred upon him by Durham and Dublin universities. Two of his most practical achievements were work as a member of several departmental committees of the Home Office on dust diseases in card-room workers, and his service as a consulting physician to the British forces in Italy, 1918–19. He retired from active work, because of increasing angina, a few years before his death. He died at his home, the Manor House, Mobberley, Cheshire, on 21 September 1939. He was survived by his wife.

Geoffrey L. Asherson
New Dictionary of National Biography