Sir Archibald Edward Garrod (25 November 1857 – 28 March 1936) was an English physician who pioneered the field of inborn errors of metabolism. He also discovered alkaptonuria, understanding its inheritance. He served as Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford from 1920 to 1927. Education and personal life Archibald was the fourth son of Sir Alfred Baring Garrod, a renowned physician who received his medical degree at the age of 23 and became a professor of medicine at University College, London by the time he was 32. He discovered the abnormal uric acid metabolism associated with gout. Garrod's father also successfully estimated the weight of crystals he obtained from a known quantity of blood, resulting in what Garrod called “the first quantitative biochemical investigation made on the living human body”. Garrod's eldest brother Alfred Henry Garrod was a successful ornithologist that named a number of bird taxa and studied specimens from the Challenger Expedition; Herbert Baring Garrod, his other elder brother also had a successful career, both as a barrister-at-law and as a scholar, writing "Dante, Goethe's Faust, and Other Lectures". Charles Keene, a cousin, frequently visited Garrod's childhood home. Keene was an illustrator for the magazine Punch for over 40 years. Influenced by Keene, Garrod wrote an illustrated booklet called A Handbook of Classical Architecture. According to Krishna Dronamraju, Garrod displayed an interest in natural history from an early age and was particularly interested in butterflies. At the age of 12, he began collecting them and noted how few female butterflies were present, musing over possible inheritance patterns in mammals. He was educated at Marlborough College and Christ Church, University of Oxford. He performed poorly at Marlborough, struggling due to his lack of interest in classics, especially Latin prose and grammar. He graduated with a First-class Honours (or a "First") degree in natural science in 1878. In 1880, he received further medical training at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he obtained several scholarships including the competitive Brackenbury Scholarship. Garrod graduated in 1884 and then spent a year studying in Vienna at the general hospital, known as the Allgemeines Krankenhaus. His experiences in Vienna formed the basis for his 1886 work, An Introduction to the Use of the Laryngoscope, which was very well received. In 1885 he obtained his Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Arts from Oxford, and became a member of the Royal College