Search Results for Medical Obituaries - Narrowed by: Apothecary

First Title value, for Searching Du Pasquier, Claudius Francis (1811 - 1897)

2024-04-28T21:41:41Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2011-11-02
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E001000-E001999/E001400-E001499
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/373662373662
Occupation Apothecary
Details Born in London on November 23rd, 1811, and was the son of a native of Neufchatel in Switzerland. He was educated in Brompton and was then apprenticed to John Nussey at Cleveland Row, St James's, and also entered as a student at St George's Hospital, to which, after qualifying, he was appointed Assistant Apothecary. He held this position for two or three years and then entered into partnership with Nussey. He practised at 62 Pall Mall, and held in the Royal Household the appointments of Apothecary in Ordinary, Apothecary to the Prince Consort, Surgeon-Apothecary to Queen Victoria (after 1862), and at a later date Surgeon-Apothecary to the Household of the Prince of Wales. He was for some years on the Court of the Society of Apothecaries, but declined the Mastership. He retired from the profession and went to reside at Norwood after forty years' practice. There he busied himself with his microscope and his roses. In early years he had been a keen collector of butterflies and ferns, and to the last he was very clever with his fingers. For about a year before his death he failed greatly and became very feeble. His death from gout occurred at his residence, Clifton House, Church Road, Upper Norwood, on August 20th, 1897. He was survived by Mrs Du Pasquier, who was the youngest daughter of John Bidwell, of the Foreign Office.
Resource Identifier RCS: E001479
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Wood, Frederick (1820 - 1906)

2024-04-28T21:41:41Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-02-27
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E003000-E003999/E003600-E003699
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/375810375810
Occupation Apothecary
Details First practised at 8 Great James Street, Bedford Row, when he became a member of the Microscopical Society of London. He then was appointed Apothecary, or Resident Medical Officer, to St Bartholomew's Hospital on March 23rd, 1847, receiving 115 votes as against the 100 of his opponent, Thomas Rivington Wheeler (qv). On the outbreak of cholera in 1849 St Bartholomew's was the first London hospital to open its doors widely and indiscriminately to sufferers from the epidemic. Between June 17th and October 6th 478 cases were treated, of which 199 died. The Physicians, with Wood and his two assistants, Mr Helps and Mr Burd, had charge of the cases. Only one of those engaged in the service died of cholera, although Wood, some of the clinical clerks and the sisters suffered severely from premonitory symptoms, which were arrested by a short suspension from their duties. From July 23rd to October 23rd, 1854, 322 patients suffering from cholera were admitted at St Bartholomew's, and of these 105 died. Seventy guineas were voted to Dr Robert Martin, who had resided in the Hospital during the epidemic, and fifty to Mr Wood, as a reward for their services. The treatment consisted of calomel, 5 gr at frequent intervals or smaller doses every ten to fifteen minutes, or calomel and opium, 5 gr, three times a day, or calomel with salines or castor oil, or castor oil with tincture of capsicum. Ice-cold drinks, liquid nutriment, and some alcohol were given. Calomel and opium at the onset seemed most beneficial. The office of Apothecary was abolished in December, 1867, when four House Physicians were appointed, each to be paid £25 a year. Frederick Wood then went into practice in St Paul's Churchyard with an address at Woodridings, Pinner, Middlesex. By 1875 be had moved from St Paul's Churchyard to Knightrider Street, Doctors' Commons, EC. In the early eighties he had settled at 13 Marine Square, Brighton. He died at 12 Lewes Crescent, Kemp Town, Brighton, on February 8th, 1906, survived by his wife, three sons and one daughter. His net estate amounted to well over £46,000. Sir Norman Moore gives the following account of his duties:- "His work was that of fourteen men of the times after his, that is, of ten house physicians, two casualty physicians, and two junior assistant physicians. He also acted as a kind of secretary to the physicians, receiving the fees for medical practice then paid them. Every applicant for treatment was at that period admitted to the casualty department up to 9 am, or a little later. From one hundred to three hundred and fifty used to appear. All these patients were seen and treated or admitted by the apothecary, and Mr Wood, after twenty years' service, used to or one of intestinal obstruction. His decisions belonged rather to prognosis than to diagnosis. His acute observation enabled him rapidly to arrive at a determination of the degree of a patient's illness rather than of its nature. He knew who ought to be admitted to the wards at once, and as for the remaining patients, if he had not time to be elaborate, he had great skill in the use of what Johnston calls 'The power of art without the show'. "He went round all the medical wards every day. The physicians of his time used to mention useful fragments of medical knowledge which they had learnt from the large experience of Mr Wood. He had the taste for botany proper to apothecaries from the time of formation of their guild, and grew vallisneria with a success uncommon in his time…. "In 1868 house physicians were created, and the last apothecary to St Bartholomew's retired on a pension."
Resource Identifier RCS: E003627
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Wade, Robert (1798 - 1872)

2024-04-28T21:41:41Z

by Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date 2013-01-16
Unknown
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E003000-E003999/E003300-E003399
URL for Files https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/search/asset/375550375550
Occupation Apothecary General surgeon Urological surgeon Urologist
Details Born on November 23rd, 1798, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, in which town his father carried on business as a brewer. He received his early education at a neighbouring school, and having been duly apprenticed came to London when 20 years of age. He had expected at once to attend lectures and hospital practice, but his father having become involved in difficulties, young Wade was thrown upon his own resources. Of a robust frame, strong will, and a hopeful disposition, he looked to the future with confidence. He became assistant to one of the 'top apothecaries' in the West End, and for some years was a veritable drudge. He made up all the medicines, attended most of the night cases and all the lower class of midwifery. He entered St George's Hospital about the year 1817, passed the College of Surgeons in 1819, and the Apothecaries' Society in 1820. The office of Apothecary to the Westminster General Dispensary falling vacant, Wade became a candidate for it and was elected by a small majority. He fulfilled the duties of his appointment with great credit to himself and benefit to the institution for some years. About 1828 he commenced practice on his own account, at 68 Dean Street. For some time he eked out a somewhat scanty income by taking pupils, who always spoke of him afterwards with affectionate respect. Wade, on his retirement from the office of Apothecary to the Dispensary, was unanimously elected Surgeon to the institution, and this office he held to the day of his death, performing the duties with such fidelity and punctuality that he was presented by the Governors with a handsome piece of plate in recognition of his services. The name 'specialist', when he took the office of Surgeon to the Dispensary, was all but unknown, but circumstances drove him, as it were, to choose a particular line of practice. Amongst the crowd of patients which attended on his 'days', numbers were affected with stricture of the urethra in all its forms. He soon found that some of them could not be successfully treated by simple dilatation, and he directed his mind to discover some means by which they could be treated with safety. Shortly before, the system of treatment carried out most extensively by Sir Everard Home had fallen into discredit, in consequence of the disastrous results ensuing from it. Home had recourse to the nitrate of silver, and no doubt was very successful in many cases, but he carried his practice to a degree of heroism which ended in its downfall. Thomas Whateley, after the failure of the lunar caustic, practised and advocated the use of the potassa fusa in the more intractable kinds of stricture. He had but a limited success, and at his death no one seemed desirous to become his successor. Then a new system of treatment was practised by some surgeons of more or less eminence, G J Guthrie (qv) and R A Stafford (qv) being foremost amongst them. This consisted in what was termed internal incision: a bougie armed with a knife was inserted into the urethra, and when the seat of the obstruction was fairly reached, the knife, being worked by a spring at the handle of the instrument, was protruded and the stricture freely divided. For a time all went well, but cases of severe haemorrhage were common, and fatal results occasional, so this variety of internal urethrotomy lost ground and died with Stafford, who, notwithstanding all its dangers and drawbacks, contended to the last that it was, on the whole, the most efficient and the safest that could be employed. Wade had opportunities of trying these plans of treatment, and after a long and anxious trial came to the conclusion that Whateley's was the best remedy; but he was soon convinced that the caustic potash had been used too freely by Whateley, just as the lunar caustic had been too freely employed by Home. He accordingly commenced his application of caustic potash in very minute quantities, and gradually increased them. He soon found that all the benefits of this agent could be obtained without resorting to the more powerful, and sometimes dangerous, amount employed by Whateley. Always cautious and painstaking, he hesitated long before he gave his views to the profession. At length, fortified by an experience of several hundred cases in public and private practice, he ventured to stand forth as the advocate of the use of that remedy in cases of irritable and intractable stricture. He denounced at first in unmeasured terms the 'perineal section' of Syme; but he was not a bigoted antagonist, and when he found he was wrong he acknowledged his error. One instance will suffice. Thomas Henry Wakley (qv) proposed and practised a most ingenious plan of treating stricture by gradual dilatation. In one edition of his work Wade strenuously opposed this plan, believing that it would cause laceration and danger; but he felt bound to satisfy himself on that point, and after some trial of the plan was convinced that in certain cases it might be employed with safety and advantage. In the very next edition of his work on stricture, he not only acknowledged his error, but actually gave a lithographic illustration of Wakley's instruments, and spoke of them with approbation. This is to his honour; for the *Lancet*, which represented the interests of Wakley, had attacked him with a rancour which was neither just nor justifiable. In 1834 he delivered a course of lectures on pathology at the Little Windmill Street School. He took few holidays - 'work to him was leisure'; but he annually rented a house at Hampstead for a 'little change', where he walked and talked with his family and friends amid the quiet lanes, the fertile fields, and the wooded heights of that suburban 'paradise'. A great appreciator of everything beautiful in nature, and a lover of the arts, he was anxious to obtain some works of William Henry Hunt (1790-1864). It was not, however, till 1851 that his means allowed him to indulge in what he then regarded as an expensive outlay. This was done with much caution and misgiving. The drawings by this distinguished artist at this period were but one-tenth of the value which they afterwards realized at public auctions. In an interview with William Vokins, who at this time had the majority of Hunt's works from the easel, and while contemplating a drawing of a 'Bird's Nest', the price of which was but twenty-two guineas, Wade expressed his great desire to purchase, but added: "I am but a poor surgeon, and though I should like it much, I hardly feel justified in doing so; but tell me honestly, should it so occur that I am unable to retain it, is it likely I may get my money again?" Being perfectly assured on this point, Wade bought the picture, and it was the nucleus of a collection of drawings of fruit, flowers, etc, entirely by this master - not large, but admitted to be unique in quality by everyone acquainted with the matter who had seen them, either on his walls or at the loan exhibitions, to which he was at all times a willing contributor. The possession of these drawings led to his acquaintance with the artist, and he became his medical adviser, attending him in his last illness. The collection - a remarkably fine one - was subsequently sold by Christie & Manson, and fetched enormous prices. Wade died at his house in Dean Street, Soho, two hours after a cerebral haemorrhage, on January 16th, 1872. Publications:- *Observations on Fever*, 8vo, London, 1824. *Practical Observations on the Pathology and Treatment of Stricture of the Urethra*, 8vo, London, 1841; 2nd ed, greatly enlarged, 1849; 4th ed, 1860. *Conservative Surgery of the Urethra...Treatment by Potassa Fusa*, 12mo, London; 2nd ed, 1868.
Resource Identifier RCS: E003367
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset