Tributes 



1 No, Peters ; you must leave him because, you see, he has got to learn 

 it for himself.' 



When I got behind that green baize curtain, there was H. Hartridge 

 working with four blood gas pumps at once, like a gnome. There were 

 also Dr. Higgins, Dr. Verzar and others ; it was a heroic period for 

 that laboratory. Among them all certainly one of the most active 

 figures was Barcroft. Looking back on it now, when I have a laboratory 

 of my own to direct, I find it difficult to know how he really carried 

 through everything. I believe as one of his duties he always had to 

 prepare the demonstration for Langley at the end of the Professor's 

 lecture, as well as looking after all the research. 



Then there was the expedition to Carlingford. There were two or 

 three of us, including Dr. Ryffel of Guy's, and we were interested in 

 how much lactic acid we could turn out in our urines, and what happened 

 to the blood when you walked one or two thousand feet up a mountain. 

 This expedition was great fun, as was anything you did with Barcroft. 

 We worked in a small hotel bathroom, estimating alveolar air and so 

 on ; he had an astonishing capacity for carrying things through under 

 very crude conditions, and, as someone else has mentioned, he arrived 

 at a final answer in that way. After one year's interlude with Professor 

 Hill in 1912, 1 came back and worked with Barcroft again on the ques- 

 tion of the /?H of the blood. Characteristically he wanted to be ahead, 

 and set me down to this estimation, making admirable suggestions 

 upon the pYL measurements. I suppose that we were among the earlier 

 workers (it was 1913) to get estimations of blood pH in relation to 

 carbon dioxide. Nowadays, I think it quite astonishing that we should 

 have reached results as close as they were to some of the modern 

 determinations. 



During the latter part of World War I there was the Porton period, 

 to which Professor Douglas has referred. I was intimately concerned 

 with that, because I acted as Adjutant there through the period of 

 eighteen or nineteen months to the end of the war, and therefore saw 

 the whole Department of Physiology grow up under Barcroft. There 

 is no doubt that he was the unquestioned leader of all the work in 

 that Department. We had some little difficulties as he was the only 

 civilian in an entirely service establishment ; but somehow we managed 

 to build up a kind of aura round him as the mysterious ' Professor 

 Barcroft ', and he was accepted as a superior being. He was always 

 making good suggestions, and was really behind the development of 

 Shaw Dunn as an experimental pathologist. When we had done the 

 work he collected the results and welded them into something worth 

 while. During this time, Barcroft was instrumental in inviting down 

 the two United States officers, Wright Wilson and Samuel Gold- 



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