Who was Plarr?

The Royal College of Surgeons of England’s biographical series Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows is named after Victor Gustave Plarr (1863-1929), the College librarian (and poet), who, in 1912, began the process of gathering information for the obituaries.

Plarr was born at Le Kupferhammer near Strasbourg in the Alsace region of France on 21 June 1863. His father, Dr Gustave (or Gustavus) Plarr, was a mathematician. His English mother was Mary Jane Tomkins, the daughter of Samuel Tomkins, a banker of Lombard Street. She wrote poetry and had had her work published in Dicken’s magazine Household Words and assisted her brother John Newton Tomkins, inspector to the National Vaccine Establishment, in his work of examining specimens of vaccines.

The Plarr family fled the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and went to Britain. Plarr was educated first at Madras College in St Andrews and then at Tonbridge School in Kent. After leaving school, he went up to Worcester College, Oxford, where he read modern history. After he graduated in 1886, he was briefly a journalist and translator in London before he joined King’s College as a librarian in 1890. He left King’s to become the librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1897.

While at King’s he joined the Rhymers’ Club, a group of London-based poets, founded by W B Yeats and Ernest Rhys. Conveniently for Plarr, the club met at The Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street, near the Strand (and King’s), and at the Café Royal, where the group dined and read each other’s poetry. Members included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Richard Le Gallienne, John Todhunter and Lord Alfred Douglas. Oscar Wilde attended some of the meetings held in private homes.

The Rhymers’ Club produced two anthologies of poems, in 1892 and 1894. Plarr contributed to both volumes; the 1892 anthology includes the poem for which he best remembered, Epitaphium Citharistriae. In 1896, he published a solo collection of poems In the Dorian Mood (London, John Lane), and in 1905 The Tragedy of Asgard (London, Elkin Mathews), a series of poems based on Norse mythology.

Around 1909 he met the young American poet Ezra Pound, who had moved to London the year before. They became friends and, with Pound’s encouragement, Plarr contributed to collections of poems published by the Poets’ Club, another London-based poetry group, in 1911 and 1913.

In 1920 Pound immortalised Plarr (as Monsieur Verog ;…the last scion of the Senatorial families of Strasbourg) in his poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Verog stands

Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones,
Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,

He entertains Pound for two hours with tales of the decadent nineties, of the Rhymers’ Club, of Lionel Johnson falling off a bar stool to his death and of Dowson finding harlots cheaper than hotels – all his reveries spoken with raptures for Bacchus…

Plarr also edited and wrote works of non-fiction, including the 14th and 15th editions of Men and women of the time; a dictionary of contemporaries (London, George Routledge & Sons, 1895 and 1899), a compilation of biographies of contemporary, eminent people.

Given this literary background, he was the perfect person to begin compiling biographical information on surgeons. In 1912 the renowned surgeon Sir John Bland-Sutton suggested that Plarr should take on the task of gathering material on the fellows of the College from start of the fellowship in 1843 onwards.

Plarr spent the next 17 years on the project, using resources he would have had to hand in the library, including the Medical Directories (published since 1845), the Medical Registers (published from 1859), The Lancet and the British Medical Journal. No doubt he also spoke to surgeons, gathering recollections of their contemporaries.

An appreciation, which appears in the first volume of Plarr’s Lives, described him as having …a cynical but kindly wit, with a wide tolerance of men and things. He was essentially a poet whose artistic temperament led him constantly into by-paths and prevented him from concentrating on the practical duties of life. Another description, in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, depicts him as charming, stooping, bald, and usually smoking.

Plarr died of bronchitis on 28 January 1929 at his home in Wimbledon. He was survived by his widow Helen (Nellie) Marion née Shaw and a daughter, Marion Constance Helen.

After his death, his notes were edited and expanded by the surgeon, medical historian and writer Sir D’Arcy Power and the first two volumes of Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows were published in 1930. The project continued through the 20^th century and now continues into the 21^st; obituaries are still regularly added to the online version of Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows.