William Jopling

Jopling and Ridley were jointly awarded the Sir Rickard Christophers Medal by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 1994.

This textbook had been widely available since its first edition in 1971. It has been translated into Spanish and Chinese.

Later in 1938, he went to Hartley, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Africa with his wife, and chiefly engaged in medicine and obstetrics. He transferred a patient with leprosy in his government car to a leprosarium and became interested in the disease. During World War II, he went into the volunteer Medical Corps. In August 1947, he returned to London with his family at age 36 and took postgraduate studies, specializing in tropical medicine. After the war, some of Hansen's disease patients came from other countries, and he took the new post of the director of Jordan Hospital specializing in leprosy. The number of beds was only 24. After 17 years, it closed and a few patients were transferred to other facilities.

He was born in Pozzuoli, near Naples, Italy and educated at Norman Court School, New Barnet and Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School for Boys, Barnet. He graduated from London University (St. Barthlomew's Hospital) in 1936 and studied medicine and obstetrics, as an intern, ending as a ship doctor traveling to the Far East.

The axis of classification is the degree of Lepromin reaction. Kensuke Mitsuda first reported the lepromin reaction in 1919, which is usually called the Mitsuda reaction. This reaction was completed by Fumio Hayashi.

William Jopling (2 March 1911 – 21 August 1997) was an Italian-born British leprologist who together with D. S. Ridley proposed the Ridley-Jopling classification of leprosy (1962), and wrote the widely read textbook of "Handbook of Leprosy" which had a fifth edition. He had a wide understanding of leprosy problems based on his experiences as the director of Jordan hospital, a leprosy hospital (1950–1967) in England and wrote various articles including "leprosy stigma".