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Royal College of Surgeons with its Honorary Gold Medal in 1883. 

 He was the first to receive the gold medal established by the Lannean 

 Society at the centenary meeting of that body in 1888. The Royal 

 Society, of which he became a Fellow in December, 1834, and on the 

 Council of which he served for five separate periods, awarded him one 

 of the Royal Medals in 1846, and the Copley Medal in 1851. 



W. H. P. 



SIR WILLIAM AITKEN was born at Dundee on April 23, 1825, and 

 received his early education in the High School of that town. He 

 commenced the study of medicine under his father, a medical man 

 in Dundee, and by attendance in the wards of the Dundee Royal 

 Infirmary. In November, 1842, he matriculated in the University of 

 Edinburgh, where, after attending lectures in the faculty of arts, 

 and having complied with the requirements of the medical curriculum, 

 lie took the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1848, his thesis on 

 pathological subject on that occasion gaining for him a gold medal. 

 He also became a Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of 

 Edinburgh in the same year. Thence he appears to have proceeded 

 to the University of Glasgow as Demonstrator of Anatomy under 

 Dr. Allen Thomson. This office he continued to fill in conjunction 

 with that of Pathologist to the Royal Infirmary of Glasgow up to 

 1855. Here he laid the foundation of that knowledge of disease 

 which procured for him the appointment as Pathologist to the 

 Hospitals of the Bosphorus, which were then filled by sufferers 

 from the army in the Crimea. In association with the late Dr. 

 Lyon he published a report on the diseases of the Crimea, which 

 appeared in a Blue-book in 1856, and it is, and always will be, a 

 valuable work of reference in regard to the maladies which were 

 so fatal to the troops in that campaign. 



On the foundation of the Army Medical School, which commenced 

 its existence in 1860 at Chatham (afterwards transferred to Netley), 

 and was an outcome of the experience of the Crimean War, Dr. 

 Aitken was made Professor of Pathology, an appointment for which 

 his early training and matured experience in the military hospitals 

 in the East peculiarly fitted him, and which his subsequent career at 

 Netley has abundantly justified. This duty he continued to perform 

 until April, 1892, when failing health compelled him to rest from 

 work. His final resignation of the chair had been fixed for the close 

 of the session in July, 1892 ; but renal disease, from which he had 

 for some time suffered, to the profound regret of his colleagues and 

 nnmerous friends, terminated his valuable life on June 25, 1892. 



Of the value of Aitken's work at the Army Medical School, as well 

 as to medicine generally, it would be difficult to speak too highly. As 

 a teacher he was pre-eminently successful in his method of imparting 



