Eminent doctors: Their lives and their work; Vol. 2 of 2Bettany, G. T. (George Thomas)
History
Eminent doctors: Their lives and their work; Vol. 2 of 2
Bettany, G. T. (George Thomas)
Medicine -- Great Britain -- History; Physicians -- Great Britain
At the end of the winter session of 1849 Dr. Williams resigned his
professorship and physiciancy, his health having severely suffered
from overwork, and private practice increasing rapidly. He removed
to Upper Brook Street, and here continued for twenty-four years in
full practice. In January 1849 Dr. Williams published his first
account in the _London Journal of Medicine_, on Cod-Liver Oil in
Pulmonary Consumption. He had been studying its application for
three years, but of course the priority in recommending it belongs
to Dr. Hughes Bennett. It was only in 1846, when a purified oil had
been prepared from the fresh livers of the fish, that Dr. Williams
found patients willing to take the oil, and in 1848 he wrote that
he had prescribed the oil in 400 cases of tubercular disease of the
lungs, and in 206 out of 234 recorded cases its use was followed by
marked improvement. The administration of cod-liver oil is such a
commonplace of the present day that it can scarcely be realised that
it is a novelty almost exclusively belonging to the present half of
the nineteenth century. And to Dr. Williams very much of the credit,
and of the proof of its efficacy, is due. A lady first visited on
September 3, 1847, appeared at the verge of death. Cod-liver oil
restored her in a few weeks, and she lived many years after. This was
a sample of the experience which, after many years’ testing, led Dr.
Williams to say, in the great work on pulmonary consumption published
by himself and his son, Dr. C. T. Williams, in 1871, that the average
duration of life in phthisis had been at least quadrupled. Of 1000
cases tabulated, 802 were still living at the last report, and many
were expected to live for years.
The New Sydenham Society, started in 1858, also found an apt first
president in Dr. Williams. Its usefulness in improving medical
literature by translations and republications has been and is very
great. The Lumleian Lectures at the College of Physicians followed
in 1862, and were entitled “Successes and Failures in Medicine.”
They were not published till 1871, when they appeared in the
_Medical Times and Gazette_. Great attention was directed in them
to the hopes and prospects of prevention of disease. In 1873 Dr.
Williams was elected to the Presidency of the Royal Medical and
Chirurgical Society, which he held for two years, though suffering
from gradually increasing deafness. In 1874 he was appointed
Physician-Extraordinary to the Queen. In 1875 he retired to Cannes,
where he has since renewed his earlier astronomical studies, and
made some important observations on sun spots. So in scientific
recreations, and in Biblical studies in which he has long been deeply
interested, the veteran physician whom Dr. Quain describes as “the
principal founder of our modern school of pathology,” passes the
closing years of a protracted life.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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