From this period Mr. Bowman has been the acknowledged leader of ophthalmic practice. He was one of the first to employ the ophthalmoscope. His numerous papers in the Ophthalmic Hospital Reports and in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions have given particulars of many improvements in operations on the eye, which he has adopted, introduced, or improved. Lachrymal obstructions, glaucoma, conical cornea, and cataract are among the subjects he has specially dealt with; and he has by his clinical teaching and operative example contributed not a little to the building up of modern ophthalmic surgery. The well-earned honour of a baronetcy was conferred upon him in 1884. The breadth of Sir William Bowman’s sympathies is shown on the one hand by the active part he took in the establishment in 1848 of the St. John’s House Sisterhood for training nurses for hospitals, families, and the poor, having joined its council from the beginning, and having materially assisted Miss Florence Nightingale in her various philanthropic nursing enterprises; and, on the other hand, by his consistent advocacy of physiological experiment. He considers that every step forwards in our knowledge of the healthy body must lead to a better understanding of disease and an improvement of our power of counteracting it, whether in the way of prevention, alleviation, or cure. In his address to the British Medical Association at Chester in 1866,[23] this eminent authority took occasion to protest forcibly against the imputation of cruelty to animals sometimes made against medical men in respect of physiological experiments. He insisted both on the excessive difficulty of these original inquiries and the high motives which actuate physiologists and the higher class of scientific inquirers. “There should be no doubt,” said he, “as to the free allowance of dissections of living creatures for the advancement, and also for the communication, of a knowledge so indispensable for our race, and for every generation of it.” He practically charged the opponents of vivisection with stopping the gates of knowledge, neither going in themselves nor suffering those that were entering to go in. The lofty view which Sir William Bowman takes of the surgeon’s function may be gathered from an extract from the above-mentioned address. “I see no reason to doubt that future ages will still accept the pious saying of one of old, that surgery is the _Hands of God_; the Human Hands, apt images and reflex of man’s whole being, from his morning hour of puling helplessness, when the “... tender palm is prest Against the circle of the breast;”