Xl. 
WILLIAM TENNANT GAIRDNER, 1824—1907. 
WILLIAM TENNANT GAIRDNER was born in Edinburgh on November 8, 1824 
and he died in the same city on June 28, 1907. Descended from an 
Ayrshire stock, he was the son of Dr. John Gairdner, who was for many 
years a well known medical practitioner in Edinburgh. His mother was 
Susanna Tennant, a granddaughter of the Rev. Dr. Dalrymple, of Ayr, the 
“Dalrymple mild” of Robert Burns. Gairdner was educated at the 
University of Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1845. The teachers who 
appear to have influenced him most were William Alison, the physiologist, 
and Robert Christison, the most distinguished pharmacologist of his day. 
After a short sojourn in Italy, in the company of Lord and Lady Beverley 
(afterwards the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland), he returned to 
Edinburgh, was appointed one of the resident assistants in the Royal 
Infirmary, pathologist to the Infirmary in 1848, obtained wards in 1853, and 
“became an extra-mural lecturer on Practice of Medicine in the same year. 
He was elected to the chair of Practice of Medicine in the University of 
Glasgow in 1862, and this office he held till his retirement in 1902. In 
1863, Gairdner was appointed the first “ Medical Officer of Health” for 
Glasgow, a position he held for nine years. He was President of the British 
Medical Association in 1888, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1893, 
and, in 1898, Queen Victoria honoured him by creating him a Knight 
Commander of the Bath. He also represented his University on the General 
Medical Council from 1893 to 1902. He was President of the College of 
Physicians of Edinburgh during the years 1893-5. In 1870 he married 
Miss Helen Bridget Wright, of Norwich, who, with several sons and 
daughters, survives her husband. 
In his long and varied career Gairdner engaged in many kinds of work, 
and the record of his life must, therefore, present various aspects, according 
as we view him as pathologist, clinical physician, sanitarian, and man of 
letters. In the early Edinburgh days, while Pathologist to the Royal 
Infirmary, he devoted special attention to the pathology of the kidney, and, 
in particular, gave an early description of the waxy kidney. About 1850, he 
investigated the pathological changes in bronchitis, and more particularly 
diseases of the lung associated with bronchial obstruction. He enunciated 
a theory of emphysema, accounting for the changes in the air cells of the 
lung in that condition by the force of the inspiratory instead of the 
expiratory act. This theory has not been generally adopted. But Gairdner’s 
contributions to pathology were not so much in the form of specific investiga- 
tions as in the general trend of his clinical work. Every case that came 
before him was subjected to the most rigid scrutiny, not merely in its 
clinical aspects, but in the verification and correction of these by the facts of 
the post-mortem theatre. In the case books of the Royal Infirmary of 
