576 Obituary — Henry James JoJtnston-Lavis. 



In 1892 Lavis took up a consultative practice at Harrogate for 

 the summer season and continued this annually till 1897. Quitting 

 Naples in 1894, he practised for one season at Monte Carlo, and then 

 made Beaulieu his headquarters for winter seasons and permanent 

 place of residence. In order to qualify for the exercise of his 

 profession in France he bad to go through the medical course again, 

 and he took his M.D. at Lyons in 1895, his thesis heing a complete 

 resume of the part played by Edible Mollusca in the propagation of 

 gastro-intestinal diseases. 



His activities, bowever, were by no means confined to the immediate 

 surroundings of Beaulieu, and he took a leading part in the 

 foundation, mainly by the financial aid of Sir John Blundell Maple, 

 of the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital at Nice, of which he was 

 senior Consulting Physician. 



Becoming the English Consulting Physician to the celebrated 

 Etablissement at Yittel (Vosges), France, about 1904, he continued 

 his summer practice there till the present year. On the outbreak of 

 the War he dismissed his patients and started on August 1 to join his 

 invalid wife near Chateau Thierry (Aisne), thence went on to Paris, 

 and finally journeyed south, intending to reach Beaulieu by acircuitous 

 and safe route. Unfortunately the whole journey from the very start 

 from Vittel was attended by misadventures, which culminated on 

 August 10 in the overset of the motor-car in which they were 

 travelling, near Bourges (Cher). The rest of the party escaped 

 with a shaking, but Lavis himself was pinned beneath the car and 

 killed apparently instantaneously. 



Although endowed with seemingly inexhaustible energy, it was 

 still wonderful how much he accomplished without relaxing for 

 a moment the scrupulous and unwearied attention he devoted to his 

 very numerous patients. More than 160 books, memoirs, etc., 

 including many important medical theses and articles, in addition to 

 numerous vulcanological writings, stand to his credit ; whilst his 

 latest important memoir was On the effects of Volcanic Action in the 

 production of Jipidemic Diseases in the Animal and Vegetable Creation, 

 etc. (1914), which gained the Parkin Prize of £100 triennially 

 offered by the Boyal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. 



A man of wide interests, practical ever, rather than what is known 

 as scholarly, he numbered amongst his other pursuits a wide 

 acquaintanceship with ecclesiastical architecture, and the carved wood- 

 work in the little English Protestant church at Vittel was executed 

 by local workmen from his exceedingly tasteful and in some respects 

 unique designs. 



Never a moment seemed wasted by him. The odd minutes were 

 devoted to looking after the fittings and furnishing of his laboratory 

 or of his museum, in examining and cataloguing new accessions to 

 his vulcanological library, or in framing after a method of his own 

 some one or other of the valuable engravings he had acquired relating 

 to his favourite subject. 



His loss will be greatly deplored not only by his bereaved family, 

 but also by a very wide circle of friends. 



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