Edward Harrison saved thousands of lives on the toxic battlegrounds of the Great War. Justin Pollard recalls this tragic and scandalously uncelebrated engineer. EDWARD HARRISON had not intended to join the Royal Engineers, he had always wanted to have a quiet life as a pharmacist. The conjunction of the two, however, makes him one of the most important but shamefully uncelebrated figures in modern warfare. Harrison had shown an aptitude for chemistry from the moment he enrolled at the School of Pharmacy in 1891, and in 1894 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Chemical Society. His particular talent lay in analysing chemical concoctions and, having set up in business as an independent analytical chemist, one of his first triumphs was his British Medical Association sponsored investigation into the contents of some of the many 'proprietary medicines' which promised improbable cures from unlikely ingredients.
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