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Resource Name:
Resource Type:
External Resource
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Asset Name:
E002797 - Nettleship, Edward (1845 - 1913)
Title:
Nettleship, Edward (1845 - 1913)
Author:
Royal College of Surgeons of England
Identifier:
RCS: E002797
Publisher:
London : Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date:
2012-08-29
Description:
Obituary for Nettleship, Edward (1845 - 1913), Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Language:
English
Source:
Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Full Name:
Nettleship, Edward
Date of Birth:
1845
Place of Birth:
Kettering, Northamptonshire
Date of Death:
30 October 1913
Place of Death:
Hindhead
Occupation:
Titles/Qualifications:
MRCS November 17th 1868

FRCS December 8th 1870

LSA 1867

MRCVS 1867

FRS 1912
Details:
Born at Kettering, Northamptonshire, the fourth son of Henry John Nettleship, solicitor, and Isabella, daughter of the Rev James Hogg, Rector of Geddington and sometime Head Master of Kettering Grammar School. He traced his paternal ancestry through six generations to John Nettleship, of Bole, whose successors made their home at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Edward Nettleship was one of seven children, six of whom were boys. The only girl died in early infancy and the youngest boy died at the age of 15. The eldest brother, Henry, became Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford; the second, John Trivett, was well known as an animal painter and as one who early drew attention to Browning's poetry; the fifth son, Richard Lewis, Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford, died in 1892 during an attempt to ascend Mont Blanc. Edward Nettleship was educated at Kettering Grammar School under Dr Tune, an enthusiast in natural history. His pupil developed similar tastes and it was decided that he should become a farmer. In 1861 he spent some months on a farm at Kimbolton and then went to the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester, of which he became a Member in 1863. He afterwards entered King's College, London, and the Royal Veterinary College, Camden Town, where he seems to have studied for the medical and veterinary professions simultaneously. He was admitted a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries and received the diploma of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1867. He was appointed Professor of Veterinary Surgery at the Royal Agricultural College in succession to William Hunting, but held the post only for a year, after which he returned to London, entered the London Hospital, and acted first as dresser and afterwards as private assistant to Jonathan Hutchinson. To the end of his life Nettleship remained the friend, as he was also the most distinguished pupil, of his master. Nettleship began to specialize in ophthalmic surgery in 1868, when he became a student at Moorfields Eye Hospital under Jonathan Hutchinson (qv) and was associated with Waren Tay (qv). He was appointed Curator of the Museum and Librarian of the Moorfields Hospital in 1871 and held office for two years and a quarter. He signalized his curatorship by introducing the glycerin-jelly method of preserving the museum specimens, a method which gave place in 1894 to Leber's formalin as a hardening and preserving agent. He married in 1869 Elizabeth Endacott, daughter of Richard Whiteway, of Compton, Devonshire. In 1873 he was placed in charge of the Ophthalmic School at Bow which had been opened by the Local Government Board in a disused workhouse, and here he lived with his wife under conditions which required much tact on his part and entailed considerable discomfort on hers. A year later he was asked by the Local Government Board to inspect and report upon the Metropolitan Poor Law Schools, more especially in reference to the prevalence of ophthalmia and the measures for dealing with it. The report was published in 1874 and led to some much-needed reforms in the care of pauper children. Nettleship's first appointment on the staff of a hospital was at the South London Ophthalmic (now the Royal Eye) Hospital. He resigned in 1878, when he was elected Ophthalmic Surgeon to St Thomas's Hospital, in place of R Liebreich, where he remained until 1895. His work there was carried out with conspicuous ability, his reputation as an ophthalmic surgeon and as a teacher became firmly established, and he soon acquired a considerable private practice. His merits and business capacity were so highly esteemed by his colleagues at St Thomas's that he was asked in 1888 to fill the position of Dean of the Medical School, a post he held for the next three years. In 1882 he was elected Assistant Surgeon to the Moorfields Eye Hospital, the election being the last to be carried out by a personal canvass of the whole body of Governors; in 1887 he was promoted full Surgeon, and he remained on the active staff until 1898. On his retirement he presented a considerable sum of money to the Committee of the Hospital to be spent in buying apparatus for pathological and physiological investigation. Other hospital appointments held by him, but only for short periods, were those of Ophthalmic Surgeon to the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, and Assistant Surgeon to the Blackfriars Hospital for Diseases of the Skin. Early in 1880 he was one of the promoters of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom and was elected the first Surgical Secretary, Sir William Bowman being President and Sir Stephen Mackenzie the Medical Secretary. In 1895, after serving as a Member of Council and a Vice-President, he was chosen President and filled the post with distinction for two years. He was also interested in the formation of the Section of Ophthalmology at the Royal Society of Medicine in 1912. He acted as one of the Secretaries of the Ophthalmological Section at the International Medical Congress held in London in 1881, and was a Vice-President of the Section when the Congress met again in London in 1913. Nettleship was President of the Ophthalmological Section of the British Medical Association at the Montreal Meeting in 1897. In 1909 he delivered the Bowman Lecture "Upon some Hereditary Diseases of the Eye", and in 1910 he was appointed a member of the Board of Trade Departmental Committee on Sight Tests for the Mercantile Marine, which issued its report in 1912. He was also a member of a special board which sat at South Kensington for the examination of candidates for the mercantile marine who appealed from the decision of the Board of Trade examiners in colour vision. Nettleship began to practise independently in 1875 and gave up practice in 1902, when he retired to Hindhead, where he died at Longdown Hollow on October 30th, 1913. His remains were cremated at Woking. He lived at first in furnished rooms in Grafton Street, then in Finsbury Pavement, where he shared a home with Waren Tay; next at Stepney in a little old-fashioned creeper-clad house with a garden, where he took resident pupils from the London Hospital. He lived at 5 Wimpole Street whilst he practised, and in 1885 he bought land at Hindhead, where he built a house which was completed in 1887, moving in 1910 to a smaller house in the same neighbourhood. Throughout his life he was greatly helped by his wife from a period of poverty to wealth, but there were no children. Retirement from practice merely meant change of work for Nettleship, and he really made his name and a new branch of ophthalmology during his residence at Hindhead between 1902 and 1913. He created a school of ophthalmological geneticists by his investigations on the influence of heredity in eye disease. He traced 1800 descendants of Jean Nougaret born in 1637. Jean himself and his race from the first were afflicted with congenital night blindness. In the earlier half of the nineteenth century only 600 Nougarets had been traced. In conjunction with Karl Pearson and C H Usher he prepared an elaborate monograph upon "Albinism in Man". He was elected FRS in 1912 largely in recognition of this work. A fund was inaugurated on the occasion of his retirement from practice in 1901 to express the esteem and regard in which Nettleship was held, and was devoted to found a medal for the encouragement of scientific ophthalmic work. The Edward Nettleship Prize is awarded triennially by the Ophthalmological Society, and the first award was to Nettleship himself in 1909 in recognition of his researches upon heredity in diseases of the eye. Nettleship was possessed to an unusual degree of the judicial mind, and his judgement in complex questions was seldom at fault. His natural reserve masked in some degree his decision of character, his determination, and his unbounded energy. As a lecturer he was not at his best, for he was not eloquent nor was his voice sufficiently powerful; he excelled especially in post-graduate teaching. He did not suffer fools gladly and he had no use for the man whose clinical work was slovenly or inaccurate. Ignorance, provided the desire for knowledge was evident, was no bar, and no genuine seeker ever failed to obtain his help. Publications: Nettleship wrote much. His articles on hereditary night blindness appeared in the *Trans Ophthalmol Soc of the United Kingdom*, 1907, xxvii, 269, and on retinitis pigmentosa and allied diseases in the *Roy Lond Ophthal Hosp Rep*, 1908, xvii, part i, 1; part ii, 151; part iii, 333. *The Student's Guide to Diseases of the Eye*, 12mo, London, 1879; edited and revised by W T HOLMES SPICER, 8vo, 1897.
Sources:
Karl Pearson's *Treasury of Human Inheritance*, vol ii

*Anomalies and Diseases of the Eye: Nettleship Memorial Volume*, Cambridge, 1922, with an excellent portrait

*Ophthalmol Rev*, 1913, xxxii, 357, with portrait

*Brit Med Jour*, 1913, ii, 1261, with portrait

Treacher Collins's *History and Traditions of the Moorfields Eye Hospital*, London, 1929, 140, with portrait

The Rev T Mozley gives an interesting account of Gainsborough and of the Nettleships' mother in *Reminiscences chiefly of Towns, Villages and Schools*, London, 1885, 74
Rights:
Copyright (c) The Royal College of Surgeons of England
Collection:
Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format:
Obituary
Format:
Asset
Asset Path:
Root/Lives of the Fellows/E002000-E002999/E002700-E002799
Media Type:
Unknown