Jane Wilson Howarth

Personal life

Jane Wilson was born in Epsom Hospital, Surrey, as one of the three children of Peggy (Margaret) Thomas (1926–2015), from London, and a bibliophile, Joe Wilson (1920–2011), from Ballymena in Northern Ireland. She grew up in Stoneleigh, a suburb north of Ewell Village. She is married to Simon Howarth.

Education

She attended Stoneleigh East County Infants, Junior and Senior Schools, and also Cheam High School, but was challenged by dyslexia. She left school at 16 to study for an Ordinary National Diploma in sciences at Ewell Technical College (now North East Surrey College of Technology).

She then studied biological sciences at Plymouth Polytechnic, concentrating on invertebrates, pollution studies, environmental resource management, and completed a research project on cave microclimate and its influence on collembola. This involved countless trips into Radford Cave and led to her first publication. During cave exploration in the UK she made extensive collections of invertebrates to document the species living in lightless environments.. In 1976 she was awarded a travelling scholarship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, which funded a trip to Nepal.

The Nepal connection led to a veterinary research job and she wrote a thesis about rabbit parasites for an MSc from Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Through this work she developed both an interest in immunology and a plan to work to help the poor in emerging nations. She then studied for a medical degree at the University of Southampton.

She gained a Diploma in Child Health (Royal College of Physicians, London 1992), a Diploma in Community Child Health (Royal College of Physicians, RCGP and Public Health Faculty, Edinburgh 1992), a Diploma of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare (Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists 2007) and a fellowship in the Faculty of Travel Medicine, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow in 2009. She was also elected a fellow of the British Global and Travel Health Association in 2017.

Medical career

Since qualifying as a doctor of medicine, Wilson-Howarth has worked in general medicine and obstetrics and gynaecology in Swindon, orthopaedics in Salisbury and paediatrics at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. She was employed on various child survival and hygiene promotion projects in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, India and Nepal. Wilson-Howarth served as a National Health Service general practitioner (GP) in Cambridgeshire for 15 years when she taught Cambridge medical students about general practice and also international health. She lectures on travel health too and has contributed to numerous textbooks, and on occasion to health stories for national newspapers. She worked with Syrian refugees in Greece for Médecins du Monde / Doctors of the World in 2016. Wilson-Howarth has been a trustee for Teaching-aids at Low Cost since early 2015.

Influences

Dervla Murphy, Eric Newby, Hilary Bradt, Gerald Durrell, David Attenborough, Joe Wilson (her father).

Sports

Wilson-Howarth started caving and also scuba diving while an undergraduate in Plymouth pursuing ecological studies. She did some cave diving and was probably the first woman to do decompression dives in the subterranean "lake" in Pridhamsleigh Cavern in Devon. In 1973 she won the British Universities and Colleges individual canoe slalom event and on the same day also the seven-mile whitewater canoeing race. In addition she won the national colleges sailing championship.

In 1978–79 she rowed for Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the first year the college had fielded a ladies eight, when they won three "bumps" in Eights Week. In 2004 she took the sport up again at Cambridge, rowing in various races on the River Cam and at Eton Dorney.

Expeditions

Wilson-Howarth spent six months on an overland trip to the Himalayan region; this was with a small team intent on finding new caves in Pakistan, India and Nepal and documenting what lived inside them. She began some research on histoplasmosis, on bat rabies and made extensive zoological collections mostly for the British Museum (Natural History) / Natural History Museum, London.

While an undergraduate at Southampton she was involved in further expeditions – to Madagascar and (leading a team of eleven) Peru. She also organised a medical elective with Save the Children in Ladakh. In 1983 she was awarded the BISH Medal by the Scientific Exploration Society for "courage and determination in the face of adversity".

The first Madagascar expedition led to a second, and this work contributed to the Ankarana Massif's recognition as an important refuge for mammals including the endangered crowned lemur, Sanford's brown lemur, as well as smaller wildlife and a previously unknown blind fish. The Massif also proved to be a rich location where important sub-fossil giant lemur remains were discovered.

Writing

Wilson-Howarth's writing almost invariably has a travel theme. Her first book (when she wrote as Jane Wilson), Lemurs of the Lost World (1990, 1995), is about expeditions to Madagascar and was described as the finest travel book thus far written about Madagascar by Dervla Murphy in the Times Literary Supplement. The Essential Guide to Travel Health is now in its fifth edition and was originally launched as Bugs Bites & Bowels in 1995. Your Child Abroad: a travel health guide is a family manual written in collaboration with paediatrician Dr Matthew Ellis. How to Shit Around the World is a compilation of toilet tales, and includes an introduction by Kathleen Meyer, author of How to Shit in the Woods. A Glimpse of Eternal Snows is a poignant travel memoir set in Cambridge and Nepal; it has received praise in the press; a second edition was published in the UK in October 2012 and in North America in February 2013. A third edition was launched in India in 2015.

Her first novel Snowfed Waters was self-published early in 2014 and was picked up and launched in February 2017 in the subcontinent by the Delhi-based publisher Speaking Tiger. The book is a fictional sequel to A Glimpse of Eternal Snows.

Wilson-Howarth has contributed at literary festivals. Her work has been featured twice at the Cambridge Wordfest; she read from her memoir and, more recently, a contribution was

selected by Oxygen Books / City Picks, for a public reading of Cambridge's finest writing. A Glimpse of Eternal Snows was also chosen for The National Year of Reading and by BBC Radio Cambridgeshire for its A Book a Day project in May. Wilson-Howarth contributed "Kathmandu" to a poetry anthology and several of her pieces on travel and writing are in prose collections.

She has written double spread travel health features for all but two issues of Wanderlust (a total of 180 articles so far) and also some for Condé Nast Traveller. She has occasionally contributed to The Independent newspaper and other national publications.

Wilson-Howarth is a member of the Society of Authors, the innovative Walden Writers cooperative, and Cambridge Writers. She often gives talks and readings especially in East Anglia. She was featured by Lonely Planet's on-line travel magazine.

Broadcasting

Wilson-Howarth has given television interviews on BBC Breakfast, ITV Tyne Tees and Sky Travel as well as on national Radio 4 programmes including Excess Baggage, Breakaway, The Living World and Medicine Now. She has also been interviewed live for radio programmes broadcast in the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Ireland and innumerable local radio stations. She often contributes to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire's Afternoon Show.

Walden Writers

Wilson-Howarth is active in the Walden Writers cooperative, set up in Saffron Walden, Essex, by authors Amy Corzine and Martyn Everett in 2008, to cross-promote the work of its members, organise literary events, publish a magazine and exchange information and support. Some meetings are workshops for members' works in progress, and covering matters of printing, distribution and marketing that were once the domain of publishers. Other members include biographer Clare Mulley, children's authors Victor Watson, Rosemary Hayes and Penny Speller, novelists including Carol Frazer, and historian Lizzie Sanders.