LINNBAN SOCIE'Ml' OF LOXDON. • 6 1 



years of his life aiteniptiiig to combat by experimental and micro- 

 scopic investigation. He was a delicate child, whom his parents 

 did not expect to rear, and at an early age lost the use of one eye 

 from ophlhalmiu. He was sent to a [preparatory school at tlie 

 age of four, and to anotlier school at Devizes when between six 

 and seven. After the death of his father, a medical practitioner 

 with pronounced sporting proclivities, in 1865, he was transferred 

 to !Shaw House School, where he stayed till 1S70, when he went 

 to live with his motlier at H'onbridge, in Shropshire, where soon 

 afterwards, through the influence of an uncle who was employed 

 by the ilrm, he became a clerk in the office of the Coalbrookdale 

 Company. Dissatisfied with this work, he wrote in 1877 to 

 Dr. J. H. Galton, formerly his father's assistant, to inquire about 

 the possibilities of his adopting the medical profession, with the 

 result that a year later he became the " unqualified assistant " of 

 Galton and his partner, Sydney Turner, at Norwood, where in 

 1880 he was joined by his mother, he being at that time a student 

 at Guy's Hospital, which he had entered in 1878, and where, after 

 securing his medical qualifications of L.S. A in 1882 and M.R.C.S. 

 in 1883, he iiehl the appointments of house phvsician and house 

 surgeon. It was here that he became associated with Dr. Samuel 

 Wilks, who inspired him with his interest in pathology. These 

 years of his life were years of strenuous labour, rewarded m 1883 

 by his being taken into partnership by Galton and Turner. 



As a general practitioner in a London suburb he would have 

 been lost to science ; but the turning-point in his life came in 

 1887, when be married Helena, the widow of Alfred Adei's. Five 

 years later he retired from practice to devote himself to bacterio- 

 logical research with Prof. Crookshank at King's College. His 

 discovery in 1892 of " Plimmer's bodies " in cancer led to an 

 acquaintance with Armand liuffer, with whom he worked both 

 at the College of Surgeons and at the newly established British 

 Institute of Preventive Medicine. He became Pathologist to 

 tlie Cancer Hospital in 189-1 and Lecturer in Bacteriology at 

 St. Mary's Hospital in 1895, succeeding Silcock as Pathologist to 

 that institution in 1899. 



On the death of his mother, to whom he was deeply attached, 

 in 1896, .he moved from Sydenham, where she had been living, to 

 St. John's Wood, and in her memory he founded the Eliza Ivei's- 

 lake Prize at St. Mary's Hospital *. After his appointment in 

 charge of the cancer laboratories at the Lister Institute in 1902, 

 he resigned liis posts at the Cancer and St. Marys Hospitals, 

 being succeeded at the latter institution by his friend Dr. Almroth 

 Wright, and in 1900 he undertook research work upon trypano- 

 somiasis for the Tropical Diseases Committee of the Royal 

 Society. In 1907 he accepted the post of Pathologist to the 

 Zoological Society, and in 1910 achieved the final and only 



* Two years after the death of his fatlier Plimmer's mother had married 

 John Kerslake, an engineer, of Bath, who died five months afterwards. 



