SKETCH OF SIR RICHARD QUAIN. 837 



medical witnesses. He tliroiiglioiit this inquiry sliowed himself an 

 excellent and logical cross-examiner. Among the medical witnesses 

 called were Dr. Burdon-Sanderson, who made an exhaustive report 

 describing his experiments; Dr. Marcct, Dr. John Syer Bristowe, 

 and Dr. Lionel Beale, who conducted the microscopical part of the 

 inquiry. It is not surprising that after hearing the evidence adduced 

 during the long sitting of this commission Dr. Quain should have 

 sided with the section which desired the extermination of the plague 

 'at any price.' This was the view of the majority, but throughout 

 the country there was an opinion, founded on insufficient data, that 

 too high a price might be paid even for the stamping out of this 

 fearful disease. This section of public opinion found its spokesmen 

 on the commission in the persons of Earl Spencer, Lord Cranbourne 

 (Salisbury), Mr. Clare Sewell Read, and Dr. Bence Jones. The 

 majority included Mr. Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke), Dr. Lyon Playfair, 

 Dr. Richard Quain, and Dr. Edmund Parkes. Dr. Quain's work 

 on this commission very thoroughly justified his appointment, and 

 his letters to the Times and articles in the Saturday Review went 

 far indeed to change public opinion on the whole matter. The voice 

 of the public at large was at first very strongly raised against the 

 stamping-out recommendations of this commission. These recom- 

 mendations, as Dr. Quain ably pointed out, would ultimately save 

 many millions of pounds to the country, and the event has proved 

 the correctness of his views. In the conduct of the Royal Com- 

 mission of Inquiry perhaps the most essential detail is the arrange- 

 ment of the method and scheme of the investigation. For this 

 portion of t]ie work of this most successful inquiry Richard Quain 

 ^yas in great measure responsible. In the third rej^ort of this com- 

 mission there were a number of valuable drawings illustrating the 

 pathology of the disease, and these were, at the instance of Quain, 

 presented to the Royal College of Physicians of London." 



Quain's first important essay in medical science, and the one on 

 which the foundation of his reputation was laid, was his essay — 

 " brilliant research," Nature calls it — on Eatty Degeneration of the 

 Heart, which was contributed to the Transactions of the Royal Med- 

 ical and Chirurgical Society for 1850, and appeared afterward in 

 an expanded and exhaustive article in his Dictionary of Medicine. 

 " Simple as the doctrine appears to us at the present day," says 

 Nature, " fifty years ago it was a startling pronouncement by a 

 young man fresh from his medical studies that fat may be and often 

 is a product of the decomposition of muscular tissue, and that this 

 change goes on in the living body. The ideas of life, nutrition, and 

 death were greatly influenced by the doctrine. This, let us remember, 

 was many years before Bauer and Voit, working with phosphorus 



