there entered on the study of medicine. During his student career he was a pupil of Dr. Fletcher, one of the most successful lecturers on physiology of the day, an original thinker, a scholar of wide and varied learning, and, at the same time, a thorough and most fascinating teacher. In the course of his lectures he did not ignore the subject of homeopathy, but, treating it academically, he, from the theoretical standpoint, admitted its probability, and indeed saw in it a certain degree of corroborative evidence of some physiological speculations of his own. The early death of such a man was a great loss to science, and indirectly, we doubt not, to therapeutics.

Having completed the ordinary curriculum, and passed through the University with distinction, Drysdale graduated as M.D. in 1838, being admitted a Licentiate of the College of Surgeons during the same year. Shortly afterwards he set out with his friend, the late Dr. Rutherford Russell, to Germany and Austria. They first visited Leipsic, and attended the Homeopathic Dispensary there. Encouraged by what they saw, they passed on to Vienna. While there Drysdale became acquainted with some of the homeopathic physicians of the city, and, by them, was induced to give to homoeopathy that further practical investigation to which the teaching of Fletcher and his observations in Leipsic had more than predisposed him. For the purpose of this inquiry he was a regular, almost daily, attendant for nearly two years at Fleischmann's Hospital in the Leopoldstadt. Dr. Dudgeon was in Vienna at the same time, and met him constantly. He, however, took no interest in homoeopathy while there, but devoted his whole attention to the study of pathology, general medicine, and ophthalmology, of which the celebrated jaeger was the professor of the day. Here, nevertheless, that long and cordial friendship was formed, which, in after years, was to unite the two young physicians in doing so much useful work for therapeutics.

After returning home Dr. Drysdale selected Liverpool as a sphere for practice. He went there thoroughly assured that in homeopathy lay the scientific basis of therapeutics, and he openly declared his so-called heretical views. He carried with him letters of introduction from Sir James (then Dr.) Simpson and other distinguished men to Dr. Vose, one of the physicians of the Royal Infirmary, to Dr. Petrie, one of the surgeons to the Royal Southern Hospital, and to others. These letters "spoke of him in very flattering terms," and described him as having "distinguished himself academically," but also as having "recently been in Germany and imbibed some of the new notions promulgated there." He was proposed as a member of the Liverpool Medical Institution by Dr. Petrie, and shortly afterwards read a paper there on the subject of homoeopathy, a paper which was warmly discussed. Among those present at this meeting was the late Dr. Chapman, of London, then living in Liverpool, who had already commenced a study of homoeopathy though not practising it. At this time, as Drysdale afterwards remarked in the course of a speech at a meeting of the Society, "the cause of common sense was in the ascendant, and he was admitted while openly expressing his convictions." In November, 1841, Dr. Drysdale opened a Homoeopathic Dispensary in South Frederick Street, from whence it was removed in June, 1842, to Benson Street, where he was joined in conducting it by Dr Chapman. This was the germ from which has grown the handsome Hahnemann Hospital presented to the city by that generous and munificent benefactor, Mr. Henry Tate. During the first year the patients numbered 932; in 1849 they had increased to 4,078. A few years afterwards the Corporation of Liverpool granted to the committee the free use of a house in Hartford Street for the purpose of the Dispensary. In no long time these premises were found to be much too small and inconvenient; and in 1860, a determined effort was made to raise sufficient funds to erect a suitable building in Hardman Street. A sum of £2,000 was obtained, and with this a dispensary-building was secured that enabled Dr. Drysdale and his friends to carry out their work more satisfactorily than had hitherto been possible. At the opening of this establishment Dr. Drysdale delivered an interesting and exhaustive account of the early work of homeopathy in Liverpool. One want only was felt, and that was the necessity for a dispensary in the north-end of the town, where the poorer classes especially resided, but soon this difficulty was overcome, and a branch was opened in Wilbraham Street. This was in 1866, and in 1872 a permanent building was secured at 16 Roscommon Street, which has been, and still is, largely attended by the numerous working-class population of Everton and Kirkdale.

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During 1849 Liverpool was visited by a severe epidemic of cholera, the total number of deaths between the 20th of May and the 6th of October being 5,098; rather more than three per cent. of the population of the town being affected. Active measures were taken by the Committee of the Dispensary in compliance with the suggestions of Dr. Drysdale, Dr. Hilbers and Mr. Moore, and they, with the assistance of the late Dr. Stewart, of Dundee - - at that time an Edinburgh medical student - worked night and day throughout the epidemic among the poor terror stricken people around them. Of 175 cases of well-developed cholera, 130 recovered and 45 died, giving a mortality of 5.72 per cent. Besides these they attended a large number of cases of cholerine, all of which recovered. The mor tality of all cases occurring in the town during the epidemic was reported by the medical officer of health as being 46 per cent. A most useful study of the pathol ogy and therapeutics of cholera by Dr. Drysdale, based upon the observation of these 175 patients, appeared in the British Journal of Homeopathy at the time. The result of this success was seen in the rapid increase in the work of the dispensary, and in the additional interest taken in the subject of homeopathy throughout the town.

Ever recognizing and insisting upon his right as a physician, and the right of all duly qualified medical men to hold office in an established hospital, without reference to their therapeutic views, he had hitherto, and still for some years continued to rather discourage than otherwise the erection of a hospital for the special purpose of affording a field for the public practice of homeopathy. The medical staffs of the general hospitals having banded themselves together to prevent the introduction of homoeopathy into these institutions in a legitimate manner, Mr. Henry Tate's noble offer to build and furnish a Homœopathic Hospital for the benefit of the poor of the city became cordially and gratefully accepted. This Institution, under the name of the Hahnemann Hospital, was opened on the 23d of September, 1887. At the luncheon on the opening day, Dr. Drysdale in speaking said: "It is not given to many of us to see a full measure of fruition of our aims and hopes when they had been delayed nearly a generation and a half. Yet it is now nearly fort-five years since the dispensary, which was the precursor of this Institution, was opened in Benson Street by Dr. Chapman and myself.”

Dr. Drysdale was appointed, and has since continued to act, as consulting phy sician of the new hospital, and has had the happiness to live sufficiently long to see not only the "full fruition of his aims and hopes," but to witness the active, useful and successful operations of the Institution which represents these aims and hopes under the direction of physicians and surgeons, each of whom has been more or less assisted by him in acquiring that knowledge of homœopathy to which they are so largely indebted for their clinical success.

The work with which Dr. Drysdale's name will be chiefly remembered in the history of medicine is unquestionably The British Journal of Homeopathy. One of its three founders, for thirty-five years its senior editor, and, during the whole of that period, the writer in it of numerous articles- signed, and, in its earlier volumes, unsigned — the value and usefulness of which have long since been fully recognized both here and in the United States, Drysdale, in the establishment, and by his contributions to this well-known Journal, accomplished a great work for homeopathy. At the dinner at which a testimonial was presented to himself and his colleagues, Dr. Dudgeon and Dr. Hughes, "in recognition of the services rendered to medical science in connection with The British Journal of Homeopathy," he summed up its chief contents in the following words: "All the arguments for and against our principles, and most of the difficulties of its application to clinical medicine, and the question of non-homoeopathic auxiliaries, have been exhaustively considered, so that any one wishing to form an opinion upon these matters has all the data in the back numbers of our Journal. This was conclusively shown by the last important argument upon the question, viz.: Dr. Bristowe's Address to the British Medical Association about four years ago. This does not contain one single argument on the truth of our principles, nor one statement of the difficulties of its application which has not been fully met."

Dr. Drysdale's energies were by no means absorbed by his enquiries into therapeutics; he was, from his student days, largely interested in the study of natural science. As a pupil of Fletcher's he was thoroughly imbued with his physiological views, particularly those he taught on the nature of life, views which anticipated in a remarkable manner the modern protoplasmic theory of life. About the first literary work with which Drysdale interested himself after settling in Liverpool, was the editing, jointly with the late Dr. Rutherford Russell, of Fletcher's Elements of General Pathology—a work which the learned and philosophical author did not live to complete for the press. From thenceforward Drysdale kept himself fully abreast of the progress - rapid and great as it has been-of physiological and pathological science. In 1874 he published a book entitled The Protoplasmic Theory of Life, in which he discussed the hypothesis of Fletcher, that the property of vitality does not reside equally in the various organic structures requiring different physical properties, but is restricted solely to an universally diffused pulpy structureless matter; an hypothesis which had, by the discovery of protoplasm by Dr. Lionel Beale, in 1860, became an universally recognized fact. During 1873, 1874 and 1875, in conjunction with the Rev. Dr. Dallinger, he wrote a series of original papers on The Life-History of Monads. These essays attracted much attention in the scientific world by the entirely new light that they threw on the mode of development and propagation of these minute organisms. In a book published in 1878- The Germ Theories of Infectious Disease - he gave a very able résumé of the various theories current at that day, and indeed anticipated, in the application of his argument to practical medicine, much of the work that Pasteur has since carried out. In an inaugural address before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool, he discussed the important question: Is Scientific Materialism Compatible with Dogmatic Theology?

In all work of this kind he was intimately associated, as we have said, with the Rev. Dr. Dallinger. This history of their friendship, how they worked together, the results of some of their inquiries, and the estimate formed of Drysdale as a scientific observer, are told in simple, touching language in a letter we have received from Dr. Dallinger, from which we make the following extracts:

"Dr. Drysdale," writes his friend, “had the most perfectly scientific spirit of any man I ever knew. He sat at nature's feet, a child, yearning, thirsting to know, but without the shadow of a prejudice. I have seen him absolutely jubilant at the discovery of a new fact which has overthrown the judgments which his previous knowledge had compelled him for long to hold. The nobility of scientific work and association is that truth is placed first. To find out nature's methods at all costs is the supreme end; and I have known, in the course of twenty-five years of quiet scientific endeavor, many men whose lives have nobly embodied this; but I have known none equal to my old friend, Drysdale, in the sincerity and simplicity of his desire only to learn nature, and in the child-like spirit with which a fact-whatever its bearing might be - was received.

"He was a true and unostentatious friend. He was absolutely devoid of conceit. He thought of himself only as a means of knowing truth and doing good; and in scientific research he was unsparing of himself and untiring in his efforts; he never flagged when once he was convinced he had taken a true path of inquiry.

"I became acquainted with him purely on scientific lines. I had taken a deep interest in the solution of the question -moot in the world of biology twenty-five years ago as to the mode of origin of the least and lowest forms of life, for it was here that the battle of 'spontaneous generation' or abicgenesis would have to be fought; and having acquired manipulative skill with the highest powers of the microscope as it was then used, I directed my attention specially to a study of the life-histories of the least and lowest forms of life, feeling convinced that by an exhaustive knowledge of the life-cycles of these forms we could alone settle the question as to whether or not they arose de novo, as was by a certain school of physiologists maintained. Over this question I had spent nearly two years of work, and read a paper on the results at the then newly formed Liverpool Microscopical Society. This greatly aroused and interested Drysdale, who was there, but whom I did not then know. To his mind the whole question had been approached by

me in a sound, scientific manner, and the methods employed, and the further treatment proposed, greatly commended themselves to him.

At this time he was not a very skilful microscopist; but he was a sound biolo gist, and (as I need not tell you) a learned physiologist. He came to me in his simple manner, and told me the facts, how deeply he was interested in the question I was working at, and asked me to give him the practical instruction needed to make him master of the microscope; and since I had affirmed that I could never alone complete the course of research, I proposed to allow him, when he had acquired manipulative skill of sufficiently good quality, to work with me, doing all that was possible to assist me in my proposed prolonged researches.

"For twelve months he patiently studied the instrument and its appliances at my house and with me, being, in fact, for many months at a time, a resident in my home to ensure a more complete success.

"We then commenced together the work of studying the life-histories of the forms now known as saprophytes, then as 'monads,' which were allied to the saprophytic bacteria, but which promised, for the inquiry in hand, better results than could be secured through the study of them. Our direct work together in this inquiry-extending through night and day observations wherever this was found necessary-occupied eight years; and during that time we were enabled to make out the complete life-cycle of seven of these forms; that is to say, we were enabled by the employment of the most powerful and perfect combinations of lenses constructed, to study the cycles of life in these minute forms and to show that their life history was as definite and prescribed as the life-history of a daphnia or even a butterfly, although they were so small that a hundred millions might revel in the space occupied by a millet seed. In other words, our researches showed that abiogenesis had nothing to hope from a thorough knowledge of the saprophytic organisms. It might conjure with this borderland of living things so long as it was unknown; but when by research we became acquainted with it, it was seen that the same great law of living things which was universal in higher and more complex forms was still true, viz., that only that which lives can give origin to life. This certainly represents the facts so far as our present knowledge goes."

In concluding this very interesting letter, Dr. Dallinger writes: "With him, has passed from earth one of the truest scientific spirits that ever rejoiced in its sunshine." Surely the lifelong testimony (based as it was throughout upon carefully studied and rigidly scrutinized clinical experience) borne to the truth of homeopathy by one, of whom a scientific observer of the high rank of Dr. Dallinger thus writes, after an intimate friendship of a quarter of a century, emphasizes its claim to experimental investigation by every truth-seeking, scientific physician.

In one other direction Dr. Drysdale showed the keenness of his observation and his genius in inventing methods of meeting sanitary defects that came under his notice. In practice he had been struck with the imperfect methods of ventilating and warming private houses that prevailed everywhere. He therefore made a study of the subject of ventilation, and invented a scheme of ventilating a house through the kitchen chimney, by means of a syphon shaft and a foul air chamber, communicating with each room by means of a separate pipe. On this plan he built for himself a house at Waterloo, in the neighborhood of Liverpool. Dr. Hayward, who worked with him in much of his materia medica studies, also took an active interest in this subject, and six years after Dr. Drysdale's country house was built, erected one in Liverpool, ventilated and warmed on the same principles, into which he introduced certain important variations. In these innovations a good deal of interest was shown, resulting in Drs. Drysdale and Hayward publishing a joint essay on the general principles, and giving some of the practical details of the question. The title of this interesting and really important book was, Health and Comfort in House Building; or, Ventilation with Warm Air by Selfacting Suction Power (E. & F. Spon, Charing Cross, London).

The loss of one so honorable and so generous, one so full of zeal for therapeu tics, so earnest in promoting a knowledge of scientific truth, so successful a physi cian, is, to his professional colleagues, to all who appreciate the value of homopathy, and long for an extension of a knowledge of it throughout the profession, and to his patients, greater than can be expressed in words.

THE

NEW-ENGLAND MEDICAL GAZETTE.

No. II.

NOVEMBER, 1892.

VOL. XXVII.

Contributions of original articles, correspondence, personal items, etc, should be sent to the publishers,

Boston, Mass.

EDITORIAL.

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WOMAN OUT OF DOORS.

We all know that the world moves; but it is good, now and again, to note some special direction in which it moves. One direction in which it has been lately moving is toward marked improvement in the physique of womankind. This is a fact which it needs no statistics to determine, though statistics are doubtless readily enough attainable; simply to use one's eyes and one's common sense is enough to bring the fact alluded to, to one's vivid realization. The physique of the rising generation of women is markedly better than that of many generations preceding.

At no time is it easier one may almost say more imperative to recognize this fact, than in walking the streets in the months immediately following those of summer rest and recreation. To note the women whom one meets on such a walk, is to note a refreshing absence of the pallid, hot-house complexions, the languid movements, the drooping carriage, the conscious exertion that, even twenty years ago, was wont to distinguish the feminine pedestrian. Instead, we note with rejoicing, faces browned as with fearless friendship with the sun, wellpoised erectness, light, free movements, and the easy gait of the walker to whom a mile or so more or less is no mighty matter. We do not claim that this wholesome state of things universally obtains. The millennium is not come yet. Women with the tints of cellar-grown plants are too common, still, as are women as dependent on the street-cars as a cripple on his crutch. But

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