Professional Career
Smith was born in Grafton, New South Wales. He attended Sydney Boys High School, he was awarded a degree in medicine at the University of Sydney (Doctor of Medicine in 1895, with a dissertation on the fore-brain of the monotremes) and developed an interest in the anatomy of the human brain. He held a travelling scholarship at Cambridge in 1896, then he catalogued the human brain-collection of the British Museum. From 1900-1909 he was the first chairholder of anatomy at the Cairo School of Medicine and investigated the brains of Egyptian mummies. He was the first scholar to x-ray a mummy.
In 1907 he became archaeological advisor to the archaeological survey of Nubia. From 1909-1919 he was Professor for anatomy in Manchester, 1919-1937 he held the chair of Anatomy at the University College London. He was elected President of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland for 1924 to 1927 . During World War I he attended military hospitals for shell shock and served on the British General Medical Council.
Smith was the leading specialist on the evolution of the brain of his day. Many of his ideas on the evolution of the primate brain still form the core of present scholarship. He proposed the following stages of development:
- a smell-dominated insectivore of the jumping shrew-type
- vision-dominated animals with an expanded cortex of tree-shrew-type
- acutely visioned, manually dexterous mammals of tarsius-type
- monkeys
- anthropoids using their hands to use and produce tools
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