`Eddie' Stokes was born at Port Macquarie where his father, Dr ES Stokes (MB Sydney 1891) was in practice as Government Medical Officer, being a descendant of FM Stokes, co-founder of the Sydney Herald (1831). His father later moved to Sydney, finally becoming medical officer and bacteriologist to the Sydney Metropolitan Board for Water Supply and Sewerage. Young Edward schooled at `Shore'.

After graduation he became RMO at Sydney Hospital, where he had been a student, later becoming assistant medical superintendent 1918-21. He had a life-long love and loyalty to that hospital being appointed honorary assistant physician (1923-44), honorary physician (1944-54), honorary secretary board of medical studies (1946-56), warden of clinical studies (1956-61) and honorary consulting physician after the age of sixty.

Eddie was a methods man; what he taught he practised (`never forget the handshake'). Taciturn in the extreme, teaching successive groups of undergraduates was his joy and toil. Interminable rounds with scrupulous attention to detail and personal visits to see or discuss the laboratory evidence were characteristic. Short of stature, quietly spoken, always in earnest, without the charismatic flair of his Sydney Hospital contemporaries Ritchie, Holmes a'Court and Evans, he was respected and loved by all Sydney Hospital staff and students. Like all specialist physicians of the 1920s and 1930s his income was supported by giving anaesthetics, but his practice burgeoned despite the greater proportion of his time being given to public work and teaching, for he was attached also to St George District Hospital (1922-28) and he taught anaesthetics (1925-35).

Eddie was not particularly a College man although he had held office in the Association of Physicians of Australasia. Much of his attention went to the section of medicine of the BMA (NSW), but he served as a College censor 1952-53. Wearing the floppy hat at the final membership viva (with virtually none of his trunk visible above the council table) was not his metier.

Written productivity came late. In 1946 with VM Brooker of AWA he produced a commercial teaching gramophone record of heart sounds and also of respiratory sounds (not previously attempted). Laboratory work together with careful clinical observations led to his MD thesis A Clinical and Experimental Investigation of the Blood Cholesterol Content in Myxoedema and Other Conditions, published as an early monograph by the Australasian Medical Publishing Co. in 1941. Clinical Investigation (Angus & Robertson, 1953) epitomised Stokes the physician and teacher. The Jubilee Book of the Sydney Hospital Clinical School (Angus & Robertson, 1960) was the culmination of his long years of teaching, detailing not only the students of Sydney Hospital, but their subsequent careers.

Eddie long remained a bachelor, living with his unmarried sister in Lindfield, but surprised his colleagues by marrying, at the age of sixty, Miss Naomi Cooper. They had one daughter. Shortly afterwards a stroke led to severe incapacity, born with stoicism and not without gnomish humour in his new role as long-term patient.