" Baptism of Fire Silver Medal for " Military Valour Acceptance Till He

161 His home life was a happy one. We may well Of the regard felt towards him by his pupils, one wonder at the irony of fate that has cut off of them who now occupies the chair of pathology too early a life so useful to the world. I am at another Swiss university testifies: "As a able to state that he bore the long and cruel lecturer Langhans was not merely reverenced for sufferings of an inveterate, progressive, and in- his learning hut was always beloved by his pupils, :sidious malady with the same fortitude with to whom, by his simple and clear style, his great which he faced his earlier professional struggles. learning, and his encouragement to exact observa- As we mortals define success, it came to Hewitt. tion, he gave a priceless preparation for their Eminence in his profession; few enemies and a careers in after-life. To his assistants and host of warm and admiring friends; happiness in colleagues he was a much-honoured master whose his home; a sense of duty done; and a life most confidence and friendship were things to be eagerly nobly spent. His contemporaries, alas, are fast sought after and, when obtained, to be deeply disappearing, but amongst those of us who are left valued. He possessed all the qualities of a successful the memory of Frederic Hewitt will never fade." research student-a wonderful gift of observation, Mr. Sheild’s tribute to Sir Frederic Hewitt calls a clear intellect, and a never-flagging interest for for no addition save the bare dates of Hewitt’s even the minutest and apparently least important appointments and honours. He graduated in medi- details; and, lastly, he practised a rigid criticism cine at Cambridge in 1883, proceeding to the of his own work, so that it rarely happened that doctorate in 1886. He was elected ansesthetist to any of it was corrected by later experience, and the Charing Cross Hospital in 1884, and held the thus, in spite of his extremely modest and retiring post for 14 years synchronously with appoint- nature, his judgment was valued everywhere." ments at the Royal Dental Hospital and the London Hospital. He was elected aneasthetist to the former institution in 1885, and retired in 1901, and to the MALACHIA DE CRISTOFORIS, M.D. PAVIA. London Hospital in 1886, where he was consulting THE Third Italy owes much to her medical anaesthetist at the time of his death. He returned to patriots from the dark days of her subservience to St. George’s Hospital as physician anaesthetist in Austria, all through the campaigns of 1848, 1859, 1902. He was appointed to the Victorian Order in 1860, 1866, and 1870 up to the present when, as the 1902, and received the honour of knighthood in 1911. youngest member of the Quadruple Alliance, she is His family life was a singularly happy one. He rounding off her north-eastern frontier and aiding leaves two daughters and a son, a schoolboy at the good cause by keeping Austria in play by land Eton, to mourn their loss. and sea. Next to Agostino Bertani, the surgeon-in- chief of Garibaldi’s expeditions, who " sacrificed to the Revolution one of the finest medical intellects DR. THEODOR LANGHANS. " of the nineteenth century and who, shortly WITH Langhans has passed away one whose name before his death, bequeathed to his country her may not unsuitably be identified with the progress great " Codice Sanitario," no name stands out of pathology in the last half-century. At first more honourably than that of the great Milanese assistant to the anatomist Henle of Gottingen, he physician and sanitary reformer, Malachia De studied under Virchow and Traube in Berlin and Cristoforis, who recently closed his 80 years of then became Recklinghausen’s assistant in the strenuous life. pathological institute at Wiirzburg. He occupied The youngest of three or four brothers, he was a the chair of morbid anatomy at Giessen for a few child when he fought in the memorable " Five Days" months, and was then called to succeed Klebs in and had already received his " baptism of fire" Berne, where his life-work was performed and he when he matriculated at the University of Pavia as remained until ill-health obliged him to relinquish a student of medicine. In 1854, as an under- the professorship which he had held continuously graduate, he volunteered his services in the terrible for 51 years. Here he was the senior member of cholera visitation, and evinced a quite unique a trio who made the Berne medical school famous talent in improvising and administering ambu- the world over, and of whom Kocher and Sahli are lances in the rural districts. In 1856 he took still living. the suniiiii in medicinâ honores, and was im- The name of Langhans is familiar to all from mersed in clinical observation and research when his description in 1868 of the giant cell as the masterly diplomacy of Cavour, inspired by an almost constant element in the structure "Italy’s opportunity in the Eastern Question," of the tubercle, and the value of this discovery absorbed the interest of all young Italians, till, is not diminished by the fact that such cells have returning with military honours from the Crimea, since been found in association with processes that the Piedmontese army found a wider field of are not tuberculous. He made two large contribu- conflict by the side of the Emperor Napoleon in tions to the study of nephritis which paved the way the expulsion of Austria from Lombardy. In 1859 to the understanding of the functions of the glome- young De Cristoforis fought in the " Cacciatori muli and the meaning of the early morbid processes delle Alpi," a Garibaldian Corps, and acquitted him- observed in them. Another important work was self nobly, till, in the following year, his conduct on the chorionic layer of the placenta. In his later under fire was so conspicuous that he earned not years he was chiefly occupied with the pathological only the special commendation of Garibaldi, but anatomy of goitre and of cretinism, and in 1892 that of King Victor Emmanuel, receiving the I " he described changes in the peripheral nerves silver medal for " military valour and also which he had found in cases of cachexia strumi- the martial Cross of Savoy. In 1866; Venetia priva. Langhans’s idea of comparing the thyroid being by this time reclaimed to the mother- glands in a goitrous district with those of a goitre- land, he resumed his clinical studies in the free one was fruitful in enabling his pupils to Milanese Ospedale Maggiore, making gynsecology recognise the earliest beginnings of the process his specialty and steadily rising in professional in the form of diffuse epithelial proliferation in acceptance till he was promoted "primario" on apparently normal glands. the clinical staff. He was now an authority and.

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