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Arthur Mourant, who brought a new dimension to biological anthropology, died of a heart attack on August 29, 1994. Arthur Ernest Mourant was born on April 11, 1904, near La Hougue Bie, Jersey, United Kingdom. He attended the Jersey Modern School and Victoria College, receiving the King's Gold Medal for Modern Languages in 1921 and the King's Gold Medal for Mathematics in 1922. Also in 1922 Mourant was awarded the King Charles' I Scholarship, which took him from Jersey to Oxford. In Oxford he spent 10 years at Exeter College, obtaining his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1925, first class honors in chemistry in 1926, and a Doctor of Philosophy in geology in 1931. His dissertation was on the geology of the Channel Islands.
Unable to obtain a post in geology during the Depression, Mourant took a complementary course in medical chemistry, returned to Jersey, and set up a chemical pathology laboratory (1933-38). In 1939 Mourant returned to his studies, this time in medicine, at the age of 34. At St. Bartholomew's Medical College, London, he gained the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1943, and Doctor of Medicine in 1948. After house posts in London, Mourant became Medical Officer at the Galton Laboratory Serum Unit and in 1946 was the founder and first director of the Blood Group Reference Laboratory, London, a position that he held for 20 years.
Mourant's breadth of expertise made him a pioneer, the first hematologist to attack the problems of worldwide blood group distributions. Not only did Mourant collate and map the existing data on blood group gene frequencies, but he also contributed much to the genetic map of the world in his numerous investigations of blood groups in many populations. As knowledge of the newer polymorphisms grew, Mourant absorbed these data into his compendia and incorporated them into his anthropological interpretations. His first book, The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups, was published in 1954. The second edition, much enlarged and virtually a new book, The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups and Other Polymorphisms, was published in 1976. These books drew together practically everything on blood groups that had been published in the world by that date. In doing so, Mourant not only appraised...