43 will be Signor G. Marconi who to deliver a lecture on Wireless
Feb. 2nd is announced Telegraphy. In the list of which have some connexion with medicine we note subjects that Professor J. Reynolds Green will deal on Feb. 9th with "Ne quid nimis. "Symbiosis and Symbiotic Fermentation"; Major Ronald Ross, I.M.S., on March 2nd will lay before his audience some THE LATE SIR JAMES PAGET. information with regard to Malaria and Mosquitoes; Professor " ALMOST coincidently with the close of the year 1899 Frank Clowes will on March 9th discourse on Bacteria and came the life’s end of one of the foremost figures in the Sewage"; and Professor J. Arthur Thomson on March 30th On Thursdays, world of medical science which this century has produced. will discuss the "Facts of Inheritance." Dr. H. R. Rivers will Jan. and Feb. W. 18th, 25th, lst, We speak elsewhere in full detail of the life and work of " of The Ssmes Primitive Man." deliver three lectures on James Paget, but we may here express our intimate sense of the loss which the profession has sustained. By his wonderful insight into the various THE LANCET RELIEF FUND. of pathology, by his power of storing up details
Annotations.
on
processes
and his faculty for comparing one with another he rendered incalculable service to the science of medicine and so to suffering humanity. His influence as a teacher was always for good, and the great hospital in which he took such an interest, within whose walls he did such admirable work, has never, since the days of Rahere, had a more faithful or
upright servant.
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THE NEW YEAR HONOURS. THE list of New Year Honours although containing no of very special distinction yet brings into prominence of many those who have done and are doing unobtrusive work for the Empire. Among the new Knights are the names of Mr. T. Lauder Brunton, M.D. Edin., F.R.S., and of Mr. F. H. Lovell, C.M.G., Surgeon-General of Trinidad. The work of Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton with reference to Pharmacology and Therapeutics and his services in connexion with the Hyderabad Chloroform Commission, on which he represented THE LANCET, are well known to our readers. As a physician of high standing and as a man who has unobtrusively worked hard in the profession to which he belongs the distinction that has been conferred upon him will be received with cordial satisfaction by all who know him. Sir Francis Henry Lovell, who is a member of the Executive and Legislative Council of Trinidad, at one time held the appointments of chief medical officer, President of the General Board of Health, and member of the Legislative Council of Mauritius. The Honourable John Alexander Cockburn, M.D. Lond. and Adel., formerly Premier of South Australia and now Agent-General in London for that colony, is made a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, and four other members of the medical profession have been appointed Companions of the same Order-namely, Mr. John Pringle, M.B., C.M. Aberd., who is a member of the Privy Council and Legislative Council of the Island of Jamaica; Mr. Patrick Manson, M.D., LL.D. Aberd., who, as medical adviser to the Colonial Office, has done not a little in the cause of tropical medicine; Mr. Wordsworth Poole, M.B , B.C. Camb., the principal medical ’officer of the West African Frontier Force; and Mr. Archibald Donald MacKinnon, M.D. Aberd., principal transport officer for Uganda. Although not members of’ the medical profession the Right Hon. Sir John Lubbock, F R S., who has been made a peer, and Captain Abney, C.B., F.R.S., who has been promoted to Knight of his Order, have done work which bears both directly and indirectly upon medicine and public health. Captain Abney in particular has by his researches into the nature of light and its phenomena, embracing the physiology of vision, rendered great service to our profession. We congratulate all these gentlemen in the name of medical science. names
THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
OF
GREAT
BRITAIN.
THE list of Friday evening lectures to be delivered at the Royal Institution before Easter gives promise of a very interesting and instructive session, and among the lecturers
I
THE report made this year by the almoners of THE LANCET Relief Fund carries on in a very remarkable way the thread of last year’s report and enables us to refer to it as confirming the inferences which we then drew from what seemed to be settled features of the administration of the Fund. We had last year to remark that the benefactions showed a reduction both in number and amount and that there was a marked tendency for the benefits to take the form of gifts rather than of loans. Save as to the reduction in the number of benefits these observations apply equally to the facts disclosed by the present report. It happens, curiously enough, that the number of benefits is precisely the same this year as last, but on this occasion only one case has taken the shape of a loan ; the rest have all been out-andout gifts. We have, therefore, a broader basis to-day than we had 12 months ago for the pleasing deduction that the pressure of necessity upon those of our professional brethren and their immediate dependents who have fallen upon evil times is sensibly less acute than it was when the Relief Fund was founded. Coinciding as this improvement does with improved conditions of general prosperity it may be reasonably referred to this more general improvement as its cause and looked upon accordingly as a real, not merely as an apparent, amelioration in the condition of those of our fraternity upon whom the times press hardest. The singular, if not quite absolute, absence of applications for loans points in the same direction and this is the more marked in the present because attention was expressly drawn last year in our columns to this feature of the almoners’ work and we then pointed out that of the various cases which are presented for consideration there is none in which it is possible to extend a helping hand with a livelier sense of satisfaction than the case in which a timely loan helps a brother overtaken by adversity to help himself. That, however, is no great matter. The feelings of the benefactor do not count in comparison with the advantage of the beneficiary, and we hope with much confidenca that the benefits conferred by this Fund take the shapes in which they are most serviceable to those in whose interest they are bestowed. It is again our privilege to make public acknowledgment of the generous services rendered to this charity by the distinguished men who have associated themselves with it in the capacities of almoners and auditor. We refer, of course, to Sir Samuel Wilks, late President, and to Dr. W. S. Church, the President of the Royal College of Physicians of London; Sir William Mac Cormac, President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England ; Sir William Turner, President of the General Medical Council; and Sir Henry Pitman, for many years associated with the first-named body as its registrar. The absence of Sir William 1llacCormac’s name frcm among the signatures appended to the report reminds us that his presence at the seat of the war in South Africa is a fine example of practical patriotism which the nation will not be slew to appreciate. Nor is the presence of