Sir William Roberts. 69 



the thoroughness and lucidity of his teaching played a considerable 

 part in the successful development of this great provincial school of 

 medicine. 



He was admitted a Member of the Royal College of Physicians in 

 1860, becoming a Fellow in 1865. In 1866 he was Gulstonian 

 Lecturer, and chose as the subject of his lectures "The Use of Solvents 

 in the Treatment of Urinary Calculi and Gout," a subject which 

 interested him throughout his life, and to which he returned in the 

 Croonian Lectures delivered before the College of Physicians in 1892. 

 He was Lumleian Lecturer in 1880, and served on the Council in 1882, 

 1883, and 1884. He was Censor in 1889 and 1890, Croonian Lecturer 

 in 1892, and Harveian Orator in 1897. In 1877 William Roberts was 

 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he served on the Council 

 of the Society in 1890 and 1891. In 1885 he received the honour of 

 knighthood, and a few years afterwards, in 1889, he removed from 

 Manchester to London, chiefly to obtain more leisure from the calls of 

 a large consulting practice. In 1892 he was appointed a Fellow of the 

 University of London, and subsequently, in 1897, he became the 

 Chairman of the Brown Committee, and he also represented the 

 University of London on the General Medical Council from 1896 till 

 his death. He took great interest in the question of the provision of 

 adequate university teaching in London, and in 1898 he was appointed 

 a member of the Statutory Commission dealing with this question. 

 In 1893 he was appointed the medical member of the Opium Commis- 

 sion, and the Report on the medical aspect of the use of opium was 

 drawn up by him. His cautious mind and freedom from bias rendered 

 him peculiarly suitable for forming a sound and correct opinion on such 

 a hotly contested question. During his stay in India he collected 

 information on the use of anarcotine, one of the alkaloids of opium, 

 and he subsequently drew attention to the uses of this body as an anti- 

 periodic. He held the view that one of the main beneficial uses of 

 opium in such a country as India was dependent upon its being a pro- 

 phylactic (thanks to the anarcotine it contained) against some of the 

 malarial fevers of the country. 



Throughout his life Sir William Roberts was actively engaged in 

 investigating many problems connected with the scientific tide of 

 his profession. Both in Manchester and in London he had a laboratory 

 in his house, and notwithstanding the calls of practice he found time to 

 pursue in this laboratory the various investigations the results of which 

 were communicated to this and to other societies. As a young man, in 

 1858, before he had embarked on the special line of investigation with 

 which most of his subsequent work dealt, he wrote a remarkable essay 

 on Wasting Palsy. This work was noteworthy in that it was not only 

 the first systematic account of the malady in our language, but also an 

 showing the keen clinical instinct of the author, since the types recog- 



