George Frederic Still (1868‐1941) was one of 12 children, three of whom died in their first year of life and two later in childhood. He was brought up in Highbury, London. He obtained a scholarship to Merchant Taylor's School and then a further scholarship to Caius College, Cambridge, where he achieved a first class honours in the Classical Tripos. He studied medicine at Guy's Hospital, London, qualifying in 1893. His first appointment was as a house physician at Guy's. He then went to the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London, firstly as a house physician and then as a medical registrar and pathologist. It was from here that, in November 1896, Dr Archibald Garrod read Still's classic paper entitled ‘On a form of chronic joint disease in children’ to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society. The paper was published in their transactions the following year1 and was also the subject of Still's Cambridge MD thesis.