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HENRY TONKS
160 toxic in origin. Strauss’s contribution was but one of a series, almost all of which emphasise some relationship between disease and defective nutrition. The symposium as a whole is a mixed bag, but it illustrates very well the trend of current thought. Deficiency has quite displaced toxins in the minds of the investigators ; and this is an excellent thing, for hypothetical toxins were a sterilising conception and have never provided us with a satisfactory basis for treatment,whereas proved deficiencies "
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offer
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great therapeutic possibilities.
HOSPITALS AND THE UNIVERSITY GRANTS COMMITTEE
,
THE work of the University Grants Committee provided the subject for a meeting of the University and Research Section of the Library Association on Saturday last. Mr. R. Offor, Ph.D., librarian of Leeds University, who opened the discussion, and other speakers were unanimous in their testimony to the freedom from red tape in the Committee’s work. They all agreed about the value of the qui-nquennial visits of the Committee to discuss on the spot with representatives of the universities their problems and needs. It is for these reasons that friends of voluntary hospitals have looked to an extension of the powers of the Committee in the direction of giving financial assistance to the actual work of the hospitals. Something of the kind seems to have been in the mind of the Scottish public health services committee in proposing a " teaching faculties grant." With the extension of opportunities for medical education in the’ council hospitals such a grant could however hardly be confined to voluntary hospitals, and in England it could not extend to the many voluntary hospitals which have no connexion with a medical school. It must too be remembered that the University Grants Committee is concerned with the medical school rather as a part of the university than as an adjunct to a hospital. Hence we think it very doubtful that the University Grants Committee will consider it within the scope of its duties to come to the financial support of voluntary hospitals. None the less, those hospitals will join with the Library Association in their tribute to the Committee. HENRY TONKS
Prof. Henry Tonks, who died at his house in Chelsea on Friday last, Jan. 8th, was rightly famous as artist and teacher, and his first impulses in those directions were received while he was a medical man, and attached to the medical school at the London Hospital. He gained the diploma of F.R.C.S. Eng. in 1888, and was for a time assistant demonstrator of anatomy in the medical school of "the London," while he held house appointments at the hospital and at the Royal Free Hospital, where he was for a time senior resident medical officer. His first direct step from one profession to another was taken when he became lecturer on artistic anatomy at the Westminster School of Art, and Prof. Brown, when he moved from the Westminster to the Slade School, invited Tonks to become his assistant. From this time forward Tonks gave up the pursuit of medicine and devoted himself entirely to painting and its teaching. In 1917 be was elected Slade professor of fine art in the University of London in succession to Prof. Brown, a position which he held for thirteen years to the great advantage of those with the pursuit of their studies at heart, and to the discomfiture of
thought either that drawing was easy or that accomplishment could be achieved in accordance with He was from the beginning some set of precepts. associated with the New English Art Club, where his contributions were welcomed by a rather select group of admirers. Otherwise he rarely exhibited his work, but several examples can be seen in the Tate Gallery, and in this gallery a special exhibition of his work was held last October. This was a high tribute to his any who
and his ideals. During the war Tonks returned to medicine, doing certain surgical work abroad, and especially acting as an artist. Here both his artistic and surgical qualities were displayed in a series of pictures of the victims of facial injuries who were treated at Sidcup. These pastels were usually drawn in two stages, the first showing the injuries to be treated and the second the results of treatment, but occasionally Tonks’s detailed knowledge of anatomy would emerge in an outline drawing for the scheme of restitution. Seventy. two of these pictures-69 pastels and 3 pen-and-ink drawings-are included in the army medical section preserved in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. They form a striking testi. monial to Tonks’s masterful drawing, while the humanity of their object mitigates their terror.
output
SUSCEPTIBILITY OF CHILDREN TO LEPROSY
Marchoux and Chorine1 contend that children not more susceptible to leprosy than adults, but owing to their inexperience and other circumstances of childhood are more likely to be exposed to infection. This opinion they base on the analogy of rat leprosy. They found that adult rats are as easily infected as new-born rats by contact with leprous animals which show bacillus-bearing ulcers ; the infection apparently goes through the conjunctiva and attacks first Harder’s gland at the inner canthus and afterwards the adjacent sublingual and submaxillary lymph glands. When rat leprosy was induced by inoculating bacilli into the skin it was noted that the speed and severity of the infection increased with the dose of organisms and the size of the area over which they were distributed. It is concluded therefore that the apparently increased susceptibility of children to Hansen’s organism is due to their greater exposure, and the greater likelihood of infection entering over a large skin surface because of their close contact, naked, with their infectious parents. The question arises, however, how far it is justifiable to argue from rat leprosy to human leprosy. True the two diseases resemble each other in some respects : Hansen’s bacillus and Stefansky’s bacillus are similar in morphology and staining reactions ; both are difficult or impossible to cultivate in vitro ; and progressive disease has been produced by each in only one genus. But the most characteristic feature of human leprosy is the affinity of B. leprce for the peripheral nerves, and this is apparently absent in rat leprosy. The contention that children are not more susceptible to leprosy than adults is not borne out by the leprolin test, which (there is good reason to believe) gives a delicate indication of the protective response of the human skin to invasion by Hansen’s bacilli. Compared with that of adults the skin of children reacts much less to intradermal injection of a sterilised suspension of leproma, and this variation of reaction probably has an important bearing on resistance in early and later life.
are
1
Marchoux, E., and Chorine, V., Ann. Inst. Pasteur, December,
1936, p. 583.
"
"
offer
"
great therapeutic possibilities.
HOSPITALS AND THE UNIVERSITY GRANTS COMMITTEE
,
THE work of the University Grants Committee provided the subject for a meeting of the University and Research Section of the Library Association on Saturday last. Mr. R. Offor, Ph.D., librarian of Leeds University, who opened the discussion, and other speakers were unanimous in their testimony to the freedom from red tape in the Committee’s work. They all agreed about the value of the qui-nquennial visits of the Committee to discuss on the spot with representatives of the universities their problems and needs. It is for these reasons that friends of voluntary hospitals have looked to an extension of the powers of the Committee in the direction of giving financial assistance to the actual work of the hospitals. Something of the kind seems to have been in the mind of the Scottish public health services committee in proposing a " teaching faculties grant." With the extension of opportunities for medical education in the’ council hospitals such a grant could however hardly be confined to voluntary hospitals, and in England it could not extend to the many voluntary hospitals which have no connexion with a medical school. It must too be remembered that the University Grants Committee is concerned with the medical school rather as a part of the university than as an adjunct to a hospital. Hence we think it very doubtful that the University Grants Committee will consider it within the scope of its duties to come to the financial support of voluntary hospitals. None the less, those hospitals will join with the Library Association in their tribute to the Committee. HENRY TONKS
Prof. Henry Tonks, who died at his house in Chelsea on Friday last, Jan. 8th, was rightly famous as artist and teacher, and his first impulses in those directions were received while he was a medical man, and attached to the medical school at the London Hospital. He gained the diploma of F.R.C.S. Eng. in 1888, and was for a time assistant demonstrator of anatomy in the medical school of "the London," while he held house appointments at the hospital and at the Royal Free Hospital, where he was for a time senior resident medical officer. His first direct step from one profession to another was taken when he became lecturer on artistic anatomy at the Westminster School of Art, and Prof. Brown, when he moved from the Westminster to the Slade School, invited Tonks to become his assistant. From this time forward Tonks gave up the pursuit of medicine and devoted himself entirely to painting and its teaching. In 1917 be was elected Slade professor of fine art in the University of London in succession to Prof. Brown, a position which he held for thirteen years to the great advantage of those with the pursuit of their studies at heart, and to the discomfiture of
thought either that drawing was easy or that accomplishment could be achieved in accordance with He was from the beginning some set of precepts. associated with the New English Art Club, where his contributions were welcomed by a rather select group of admirers. Otherwise he rarely exhibited his work, but several examples can be seen in the Tate Gallery, and in this gallery a special exhibition of his work was held last October. This was a high tribute to his any who
and his ideals. During the war Tonks returned to medicine, doing certain surgical work abroad, and especially acting as an artist. Here both his artistic and surgical qualities were displayed in a series of pictures of the victims of facial injuries who were treated at Sidcup. These pastels were usually drawn in two stages, the first showing the injuries to be treated and the second the results of treatment, but occasionally Tonks’s detailed knowledge of anatomy would emerge in an outline drawing for the scheme of restitution. Seventy. two of these pictures-69 pastels and 3 pen-and-ink drawings-are included in the army medical section preserved in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. They form a striking testi. monial to Tonks’s masterful drawing, while the humanity of their object mitigates their terror.
output
SUSCEPTIBILITY OF CHILDREN TO LEPROSY
Marchoux and Chorine1 contend that children not more susceptible to leprosy than adults, but owing to their inexperience and other circumstances of childhood are more likely to be exposed to infection. This opinion they base on the analogy of rat leprosy. They found that adult rats are as easily infected as new-born rats by contact with leprous animals which show bacillus-bearing ulcers ; the infection apparently goes through the conjunctiva and attacks first Harder’s gland at the inner canthus and afterwards the adjacent sublingual and submaxillary lymph glands. When rat leprosy was induced by inoculating bacilli into the skin it was noted that the speed and severity of the infection increased with the dose of organisms and the size of the area over which they were distributed. It is concluded therefore that the apparently increased susceptibility of children to Hansen’s organism is due to their greater exposure, and the greater likelihood of infection entering over a large skin surface because of their close contact, naked, with their infectious parents. The question arises, however, how far it is justifiable to argue from rat leprosy to human leprosy. True the two diseases resemble each other in some respects : Hansen’s bacillus and Stefansky’s bacillus are similar in morphology and staining reactions ; both are difficult or impossible to cultivate in vitro ; and progressive disease has been produced by each in only one genus. But the most characteristic feature of human leprosy is the affinity of B. leprce for the peripheral nerves, and this is apparently absent in rat leprosy. The contention that children are not more susceptible to leprosy than adults is not borne out by the leprolin test, which (there is good reason to believe) gives a delicate indication of the protective response of the human skin to invasion by Hansen’s bacilli. Compared with that of adults the skin of children reacts much less to intradermal injection of a sterilised suspension of leproma, and this variation of reaction probably has an important bearing on resistance in early and later life.
are
1
Marchoux, E., and Chorine, V., Ann. Inst. Pasteur, December,
1936, p. 583.