Very closely associated with the name of Robert Graves in all that made the Irish School of Medicine influential for good, about the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is that of William Stokes. Stokes' work on Diseases of the Chest and, later in life, his treatise on Diseases of the Heart and Aorta stamp him as one of the great physicians of all time. His name is assured of immortality in medicine, because with that of the well-known Scotch physician, Cheyne, who came to Dublin late in the second decade of the nineteenth century, it is associated in the term most commonly used for a form of breathing, having special diagnostic and prognostic significance in certain serious diseases, and which is known as Cheyne-Stokes respiration. Even more interesting, however, than Stokes the physician, is, as we shall see, Stokes the man, and all that he stood for in his generation in Dublin, during a long life. {186} William Stokes was of a family that had long been distinguished in Dublin for scholarship. While his ancestors came originally from England, five generations occupied more or less prominent positions in the public life of Ireland, and they had lived in Dublin for more than one hundred and fifty years before Stokes began to be prominent in Irish medicine. His father, Whitley Stokes, had been a scholar and Senior Fellow of Trinity College, and was prominent in the scientific, political, and literary circles of the Irish capital at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. He had been a member of the United Irishmen, but fearing that the revolutionary principles that were being propagated would only bring about an ineffectual rebellion, he separated himself from them, though years after when the United Irishmen came under the ban of the English government his previous connection with them cost him suspension from the fellowship. Later on, however, Whitley Stokes became the Regius Professor of the Practice of Medicine at Trinity College, a chair which he held until succeeded in the early forties of the nineteenth century by his son, William, the subject of this sketch. Something of the character of the man can be judged from the fact that though he was a distinguished physician and interested in every branch of science, taking an active part in the foundation of Trinity College Botanical Gardens, and being one of the founders of the Zoological Garden in Phoenix Park, he was also the author of a prize essay in reply to Tom Paine's Age of Reason, which was then attracting so much attention.