Thomas Lionel Hardy

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Thomas Lionel Hardy (15 April 1887 – 16 May 1969) was a British doctor who helped pioneer gastroenterology. He was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, and studied at Radley College, Selwyn College Cambridge, and the Middlesex Hospital. He qualified as a doctor in 1913 and served in the Army Medical Corps during World War I, on the Western Front, reaching the rank of major and earning a mention in despatches.

After the war he worked at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham. He earned his MD in 1925 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1929. He gave the Croonian Lecture in 1944, a prestigious address. In 1948 he received a personal chair in gastroenterology at the University of Birmingham and helped found the British Society of Gastroenterology, serving as its first honorary secretary.

Hardy is best known for helping develop a rubber-based ileostomy bag. In 1948, after reading about an American design, he and colleagues Trevor Cooke, Clifford Hawkins, and Bryan N. Brooke, with support from Dunlop’s research team, created and tested a successful bag. This greatly improved treatment for ulcerative colitis.

In his personal life, Hardy married Elizabeth Clarke Ritchie in 1914 and they had four children. After Elizabeth died in 1952, he married Margaret Askham in 1954. He died in 1969 at age 82.