xl Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 
Edinburgh and of the Western Infirmary of Glasgow, there are painstaking 
records of the most valuable description, monuments of industry, insight, and 
method. 
As a clinical physician he belonged to the first rank of workers. In the old 
days this part of investigation, especially as regards the teaching of students, 
was carried on in a very loose fashion. The physician often passed from bed 
to bed in the wards, followed by a crowd of students, who were left to 
gather wisdom and knowledge as they could from the oracular utterances of 
the wise man. There was no systematic investigation of cases nor any 
attempt at methodical teaching of the student. The first great improve- 
ments were no doubt initiated by John Hughes Bennett, who, fresh from the 
cliniques of the Parisian hospitals, was the first in this country*to teach the 
student at the bed side, by causing him to observe the facts of the case, and 
to discuss, with the teacher, all its features. Gairdner readily took up the 
same course of Peocedure. More thorough and philosophical than Bennett, 
he went more deeply into the case, and worked out what may be termed its 
natural history. He disliked clinical pictures. He disliked the practice of 
drawing up an imaginary schedule for each disease with a space for each sign 
and symptom, which had to be filled in whether it happened to be in the 
case under discussion or not. His method was rather to study each 
individual case and to closely scrutinise each symptom, to note those 
belonging to the typical form of the disease that were absent in this 
particular case, and to draw inferences with care and precision. It was the 
scientific method that impressed the student and trained him to be an 
observer. Gairdner always attracted to him the better type of men, and 
many of his pupils became, in their turn, able pathologists and physicians. 
In practical therapeutics he also did valuable work. He was one of the first 
to check the over-stimulating mode of treatment in fevers and pneumonia, 
and when he did use medicinal substances they were employed in a simple 
form. He never wrote a “ grape and canister” prescription containing half 
a dozen ingredients. He had no great faith in drugs, nor in specially 
vaunted remedies, or modes of treatment. There must be, in his view, 
a good reason for the employment of a particular remedy and he was not 
guided by empirical considerations, except to a very limited extent. As 
a consultant, therefore, he was often somewhat disappointing, as he was more 
interested apparently in the clinical history of the case and in its pathology 
than in the treatment. He had a strong view that in many cases natural 
processes would remove the disease, while, in others, so-called remedies were 
of little avail. 
One of Gairdner’s chief claims to distinction is the splendid work he did 
as the first medical officer of health of Glasgow. During the first half of 
the nineteenth century, and closely connected with the industrial revolution 
that followed the introduction of machinery and the factory system, many 
large towns rapidly increased in population and unsanitary conditions of life 
were met with everywhere. In no city was this more conspicuous than in 
