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OBITUARY. 



Pkofessoe Henry George Plimmer, M.R.C.S., F.R.S., etc.* 

 [President R.M.S.. 1911-12.] 



I. — Life. 



Henry George Plimmer was born in Melksham, Wiltshire, on 

 January 29, 1856. As a young child he suffered from ophthalmia, 

 and practically lost the sight of his right eye thereby. It is 

 ironically curious that ever since he began medicine he used 

 microscopes more than any other instrument. 



His father, Dr. George Plimmer, though Melksham is a small 

 town, had a good practice for the country. He was fond of hunting 

 and shooting, indeed of sport of all kinds, and was a well-known 

 figure in the county. George Plimmer had been previously 

 married, and had by liis former wife one daughter, who had great 

 musical talent. Henry George's mother and her family were not 

 musical, so that his talent must have come from his father, although 

 the latter often remarked that " music was only fit for women and 

 fools." This is a curious anomaly — the father, with his skill in 

 sport and contempt for music : the son, with no interest in sport 

 and with passion for music. 



His father died in 1865. Henry George records that he had 

 no really distinct memory of his father, although he was nine years 

 old at the time of his death, and attributes this to the fact that he 

 was at boarding-school from the age of six, at Devizes. After his 

 father's death it was decided to send him to Shaw House School, 

 which had a local reputation, and was about a mile from Melksham. 

 He seems to have taken every prize at this school except those 

 for conduct and Scripture. He learned very little, but remembeied 

 some mathematics, for which he was grateful. 



In September, 1867, his mother married John Kerslake, of 

 Bath. He died the following year, and she left Bath early in 1870, 

 and took a tiny house in Ironbridge, Shropshire. ' Young PHmmer 

 left school in June, 1870, and joined his mother at Ironbridge. 



* Professor Plimmer has fortmiately left an autobiography in which he set 

 dowu details of his life for the purpose of any biography or fair statement of his 

 work. It was mostly written in the garden of his friend Goetze, during the 

 summer of 1917. It would seem that he had a presentiment of the fatal illness to 

 which he succumbed in less than a year iafterwards. 



