The Irish Schools of Medicine have had a briefer history than those of Edinburgh and London, but have produced men whose character and labours rank among the highest. WILLIAM STOKES, born in July 1804 in Dublin, was the son of Whitley Stokes, Regius Professor of Medicine in the University, a man of lofty aims and untiring energy, and a very successful teacher of medicine. Father and son alike were students of the Edinburgh Medical School; but the son owed much to personal companionship with his father. After a few months at Glasgow, young Stokes entered at Edinburgh early in 1823, and soon came in contact with Dr. Alison, who exercised a profound influence upon him; “the best man I ever knew,” he declared. Such striking progress did he make, that before he left Edinburgh, in 1825, he had written and published a little book on “The Use of the Stethoscope,” which he was fortunate enough to sell for £70. On settling in Dublin, young though he was, Stokes was elected Physician to the Meath Hospital, in succession to his father. His colleague, Graves, one of the most remarkable men Dublin had produced, exercised a striking influence over him. At twenty-two Stokes was already lecturing and giving clinical instruction to a crowd of pupils. The time was one of acute distress and poverty in Ireland; fever raged in Dublin, owing to the distress caused by the failure of the potato crop in the summer of 1826. The Meath Hospital was crowded, and the young physician was taxed to the utmost, and his benevolent charity became fixed as a second nature. During these years of activity, a powerful special object was employing his most persistent thought and observation. He was diligently storing his mind with every fact and inference bearing on diseases of the lungs. In 1837 his observations were published in the classic work on “Diseases of the Chest.” It at once placed him, says Sir Henry Acland in the memoir prefixed to the edition published by the New Sydenham Society in 1882, in the front rank of observers and thinkers. His exposition of the use of auscultation in bronchitis and the affections of the chest was most valuable.