J. Sampson Gamgee
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J. SAMPSON GrAMGEE, OF BIRMINGHAM. On the evening of Saturday, 18th September, Mr J. Sampson G-amgee died at his residence, Broad Street, Birmingham, in his rfty-ninth year, from uremic poisoning, the result of chronic 480 OBITUARY. [NOV. 18: kidney disease, accelerated by a recent fracture of the femi sustained a few weeks ago. Mr Gamgee was born, we believe, at Florence in 1828, and 1 received his earliest professional education in Italy, and afterward at Paris, and the many years spent on the Continent made him most accomplished linguist. As a young man he came to London, and entered at University College, where he achieved distinction and gained the Liston Prize in 1853 for an essay on the "Starched Apparatus for the Treatment of Fractures." He was contemporary with Sir Joseph Lister, Sir Henry Thompson, B. W. Richardson, Richard Quain, and Christopher Heath. He was admitted a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, England, in 1854, and later he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. For a short period Mr Gamgee was House Surgeon at University College Hospital, which he left to volunteer for service in the Crimean War, where he obtained a great knowledge of gun-shot wounds. At the end of the war Mr Gamgee returned to London, and was appointed Assistant Surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital. In 1857, after a severe competition, he was elected one of the Honorary Surgeons to the Queen's Hospital, Birmingham, and retained that position until eight years ago, when he retired from active work at the Hospital, and was nominated one of the Consulting Surgeons, a position he held at the time of his death. Mr Gamgee was a brilliant writer, a powerful speaker, and a master of the art of conversation. For upwards of thirty years he was a constant correspondent of the Lancet on Surgical and other topics, and it may be mentioned that when he awoke on Saturday morning last, the first thing he asked for was this week's Lancet. Amongst some of Mr Gamgee's best known publications are an essay on the "Starched Apparatus in the Treatment of Fractures of the Limbs," which gained the Liston Prize (1853). In 1854 he published a work on Researches in Pathological and Clinical Surgery. In 1865 an annotation on a successful case of Amputation at the Hip Joint obtained for him the distinction of election as Foreign Corresponding Member of the Society of Surgeons in Paris. In 1871 he issued a volume on the Treatment of Fractures of the Limbs, and in 1878 another on the Treatment of Wounds, "Vivisection and Human Surgery," and many historical and bio- graphical essays, the most important of which may be considered an essay on Harvey and Csesalpinus, the two rival discoverers of the physiology of the circulation of the blood. He was also one of the main teachers of the system of the dry and infrequent dressing of wounds, and by his publications and inventions in this direction he made for himself a wide-reaching reputation. The remains of the late Mr J. Sampson Gamgee were interred on September 22nd in Handswortli Old Church burial-ground, with manifold marks of respect and sorrow, and the funeral was attended by a considerable number of the medical profession in Birmingham. .