April 15, 1909] 



NATURE 



195 



in the pre-antiseptic days of surgery. Educated at 

 University College School, Arthur Gamgee subse- 

 quently entered Edinburgh University, and came 

 under the influence of John Goodsir and Christison, 

 for both of whom he retained a warm affection 

 throughout his life. After taking his medical degree 

 in i8b2, the subject of his thesis, for which he was 

 awarded a gold medal, being " An Inquiry into the 

 Physiology and Pathology of Foetal Nutrition," he 

 became assistant to Maclagan, who was at that time 

 professor of medical jurisprudence. Ten years later, 

 after the publication of several physiological papers, 

 among which the most important are those on 

 the action of nitrites on haemoglobin, on the 

 development of heat in the process of arterialisation 

 of the blood, which Mario Camis has only recently 

 shown to be an exothermic reaction {Mem. Real. Ace. 

 del Torino, 1908, 58, pp. 141^69), and, with 

 J. Dewar, on the constitution of cystine — urinary 

 calculi being at that time the only known source of 

 this amino-acid, Gamgee was elected a Fellow of the 

 Royal Society. He was at that time thirty-one years 

 of age. In 1873 '''^ became the first Brackenbury pro- 

 fessor of physiology in Owens College, Manchester, 

 where he founded the school in this subject, and as 

 Dean of the medical school actively assisted in the 

 transformation of the college into the Victoria Univer- 

 sity. His work in this direction seems to have been 

 most unaccountably ignored, for his name is not even 

 mentioned in a recently published history of the 

 development of the university. From 1882 to 1885 

 he was Fullerian professor of physiology in the Royal 

 Institution. A few years after leaving Manchester 

 in 1SS5 Gamgee was elected assistant physician at 

 St. George's Hospital, where he lectured on pharma- 

 cology and materia medica, and then, having decided 

 to reside abroad, he practised as a consulting physi- 

 cian in Switzerland at Lausanne, and for several 

 years at Montreux. During this time he was also 

 actively engaged in research, and on his return to 

 England in 1904 he continued his original work in 

 Cambridge and in the physiological laboratory of the 

 University of London, where, indeed, he was at work 

 on the morning of the day of his departure for 

 Paris. On two occasions, in 1902 and 1903, he was 

 invited to America, and his first visit was under- 

 taken with the view of reporting upon the present 

 state of our knowledge of nutrition, a subject which 

 was being elaborately investigated by Chittenden, 

 Atwater, and Benedict. From the Universities ot 

 Edinburgh and Victoria he received the honorary 

 degrees of LL.D. and D.Sc, and during the last few- 

 months of his life was engaged in furthering the 

 success of the International Congress of Applied 

 Chemistry, which meets on May 26 ; of this he was 

 vice-president of the physiological chemistry section. 

 The council of the Royal Society chose him to repre- 

 sent the society at the celebration of Albrecht v. 

 Haller's bicentenary at Berne last year. 



The twelve years during which Dr. Gamgee 

 worked in Manchester were in some respects the 

 period of his greatest activity. Owens College was 

 the foremost scientific institution in this country at 

 that time, which was one of stress and strain for 

 all who had the real interests of scientific work at 

 heart. The paramount influence of Owens College 

 in the 'sixties as a centre of scientific thought is 

 hardly realised to-day, when the struggle from which 

 an entirely new type of education was to be evolved 

 is over, indeed is almost forgotten. The names of 

 Sir Henry Roscoe, Balfour Stewart, Stanley Jevons, 

 Boyd Dawkins, and Julius Dreschfield occur to us, 

 among others, whom Gamgee found as his colleagues 

 and friends, and he will always be associated with 

 NO. 2059, VOL. 80I 



them as aiding in making the college the most con- 

 spicuous school of scientific research in the country. 



The science of physiology, which has actually 

 arisen and developed jn this country within the last 

 three decades, and become a school which easily 

 ranks with any on the Continent or in America, 

 owes much to its real founders, Michael Foster, 

 Burden Sanderson, and Arthur Gamgee, who were 

 all well acquainted with the work of Claude 

 Bernard, Carl Ludvvig, Du Bois Reymond, Helm- 

 holtz, and Kiihne, and had recognised that only by 

 an application of the experimental method to physio- 

 logy, which was a subject that must be studied in 

 adequately equipped laboratories, was there any prob- 

 ability, of bringing this subject into line with other 

 experimental sciences. In the development of this 

 movement Arthur Gamgee took his share, and 

 brought an acute intellect and a highly trained 

 knowledge of chemical and physical methods to bear 

 on the study of physiology. Apart from the original 

 work which was done under his direction, the publi- 

 cation of the first volume of the " Text-book of the 

 Physiological Chemistry of the Animal Body, includ- 

 ing an Account of the Chemistry of Pathological 

 Processes," marks an epoch in English physiology. 

 This volume was dedicated to Christison. It at 

 once established Gamgee's reputation, and even 

 to-day remains one of the most accurate and valuable 

 works in medical literature. The subject is treated 

 from the biological rather than from the purely 

 chemical point of view ; it involved a vast amount 

 of experimental work, and the book was what the 

 author claimed it to be, an original work, and not 

 a compilation of facts obtained by the evisceration 

 of pre-existing treatises on physiological chemistry. 

 The book will long remain a lasting credit to 

 British physiology. Thirteen years later a second 

 volume, which dealt with the chemistry of diges- 

 tion, appeared, and, like its predecessor, this gave 

 a complete survey of what was known at that 

 time on the subject ; that portion of the work 

 which treated of the bile, jaundice, and the forma- 

 tion of gall-stones was of particular excellence. His 

 address in 1882, when as president of the Biological 

 Section of the British Association it fell to his lot to 

 express the loss which science had suffered by the 

 deaths of Darwin and F. M. Balfour, was an histori- 

 cal account of the growth of our knowledge on the 

 process of secretion. This address may well be 

 studied by those who wish to grasp clearly the literary 

 and scientific qualities of Gamgee's mind. 



The application of physical and chemical methods 

 to physiology was well seen in Gamgee's work. In 

 the Croonian lecture before the Royal Society in 

 1904 he gave a full account of his life-long researches 

 on hcemoglobin — the dextro-rotatory properties of 

 this pigment, its absorption bands in the violet and 

 ultra-violet portions of the spectrum, the para-mag- 

 netic property of haemin and hamatin, together with 

 the demonstration that haemoglobin falls as a 

 coloured cloud in the colloidal state through a clear 

 supernatant liquid in the anodic compartment of an 

 electrolytic cell. These additions to knowledge we 

 owe entirely to Gamgee. In later years his attention 

 .was devoted to the solution of a problem which had 

 occupied his mind from the early days when he 

 worked in Tait's laboratory, and in a paper published 

 in the Philosophical Transactions for 1908 he 

 showed for the first time how, by the employment of 

 special thermoelectric junctions, improved thermo- 

 stats, and the photographic recorder or the string re- 

 corder devised by Horace Darwin, a continuous or 

 quasi-continuous registration of the diurnal curve of 

 the fluctuations in the body temperature of animals 



