Ixvil Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 
he had to give courses of operative surgery, perform numerous operations, and 
attend to private practice. In spite of all this, however, he managed to find 
time for scientific work, and made investigations into the pathology of various 
febrile and septic diseases of India which had previously received there little 
or no attention. He took up the hygiene of hospitals, and drew official 
attention to the defects in structure and sanitation which rendered the Indian 
hospitals unhealthy. But the research in which he took the greatest interest 
was his zoological work on the snakes of India, and his physiological 
investigation into the action of their venom. The difficulties under which his 
scientific work was carried on are shown by the fact that he had often to 
leave an experiment in order to attend to his hospital work, and while there 
amputating a limb, or performing some other operation, his mind would be 
disturbed by anxiety regarding the condition of his private patients who were 
anxiously waiting for him. 
His scientific interests were very wide in character. It was in consequence 
of meteorological work that he had done that he was elected a Fellow of the 
Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1859. When on the Council of the Asiatic 
Society of Bengal, he proposed an ethnological investigation of the races of 
India. This proposal produced some useful reports, but was never fully 
carried out. Another proposal to form a Zoological Society and Gardens in 
Calcutta, which he made when President of the Asiatic Society in 1869, was 
more fortunate, and, though delayed for a time, it was ultimately carried into 
effect. 
For a time Fayrer was surgeon to the Governor-General and also President 
of the Medical Faculty of the University. In 1870, he accompanied the Duke 
of Edinburgh on his travels through the North-West of India, and Lord 
Mayo in the Terai in the following year. In 1872, his health failed, and he 
returned to England, where he became President of the Medical Board at the 
India Office. His magnificent work on the Thanatophidia of India had been 
published by the Government, and, after his return to England, he resumed, 
in collaboration with Lauder Brunton, the researches he had begun in India 
on snake venom. Their researches on Cobra Venom were published in the 
‘Roy. Soc. Proc.’ No. 145, 1873, and No. 149, 1874, and on Crotalus Venom in 
‘Roy. Soc. Proc.’ No. 159, 1875. They examined the antidotal action of many 
substances, and found that permanganate of potash, which Fayrer had 
already tried, appeared to be most promising (‘ Roy. Soc. Proc.,’ 1878, vol. 27, 
p. 465). 
In 1875, Fayrer accompanied King Edward VII, who was then Prince of 
Wales, on his tour through India, and but for his extensive knowledge and 
firm decision in difficult circumstances, the Prince might have been induced 
by the earnest entreaties of various personages to visit infected places, with 
the probable result that cholera might have spread over large districts of 
India, and that our King might never have returned from his visit to that 
part of the Empire. 
In 1876, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was a Member 
