110 Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



RICHARD THORNE THORNE. 1841-1899. 



RICHARD THORNE THORNE began work in the public health service 

 of the State in 1867, when he was selected by Mr. (Sir John) Simon 

 to undertake certain sanitary inquiries for the Medical Department of 

 the Privy Council. At that date Thorne was 26 years of age. He 

 had graduated with distinction at the University of London, and was 

 physician to the London Fever and to other hospitals. By 1871, 

 when the Privy Council Medical Department was, with others, 

 merged into the newly created Local Government Board, Thorne had 

 become a permanent member of its staff, and thenceforward he served 

 that Board successively as medical inspector, assistant medical officer, 

 and chief medical officer. He had held the last of these offices nearly 

 eight years, when his career of usefulness was terminated by his 

 sudden death on 18th December (1899). 



Under the Local Government Board, in the early days of its adminis- 

 tration, there was curtailment of the original sanitary investigation 

 field work, as it might be called which had characterised the regime of 

 the Privy Council Medical Department. Certain opportunities, how- 

 ever, for work of this sort fell to Thorne, and he made full use of them. 

 No research is better known, for instance, than his inquiry into an 

 outbreak of enteric fever at Caterham, which he succeeded in referring 

 to accidental specific pollution of the deep well-water which supplied 

 that district ; and it was at this stage of his career that, as occasion 

 served, he pursued his studies of diphtheria. Meanwhile his adminis- 

 trative faculties were maturing which, in later days, found expression 

 so greatly to the profit of his Department. In 1883, during the period 

 in which the late Sir George Buchanan was his chief, Thorne was, on 

 the retirement of Netten Radcliffe, appointed assistant medical officer 

 of the Board. In this capacity, alike in the performance of excep- 

 tional duties and of day-to-day official tasks, he showed very special 

 ability. He was keen to acquire knowledge which was being gained 

 by workers in sanitary science at home and abroad, and particularly 

 by his own Department under Buchanan's direction ; and he was 

 quick to see the applicability of such knowledge to practical sanitary 

 administration. He had a habit of adopting in regard of a given 

 subject so much as, in the light of current knowledge, bore directly on 

 public health and was at the same time feasible in application from the 

 administrative standpoint. The Local Government Board " Model " 

 series of sanitary by-laws, and its memoranda on isolation hospital 



