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SIR WILLIAM HENRY BROADBENT, Barr., K.C.V.O., 1835—1907. 
Sm Wittiam Henry BrRoaDBENT, born in 1835, was the son of John 
Broadbent, of Longwood Edge, Huddersfield. He married, in 1863, Eliza, 
daughter of Mr. John Harpin, of Birks House, Holmfirth, Yorkshire, by whom 
he had two sons and three daughters. His two sons, Dr. John Francis 
Harpin Broadbent, who succeeds his father in the baronetcy, and Dr. Walter 
Broadbent, are both members of the medical profession. 
Broadbent had a distinguished career as a student of medicine and after- 
wards as a great physician. He took a distinguished place in the medical 
world not only as a practitioner, but as an original investigator of difficult 
medical questions, and of physiological subjects bearing on the science and 
practice of medicine. He had the originality of a man who thought for 
himself; originality shown in finding out new things and not merely in 
developing a little further the discoveries of others. His professional 
success was great and well deserved. 
In 1892 he was appointed physician-in-ordinary to H.R.H. the Prince of 
Wales, now King Edward VII. Next year a baronetcy was given him, and 
in 1901 he was made a Knight Commander of the Victorian Order. Nor 
were honours of this kind limited to those conferred in this country; he 
was invested with the Grand Cross and Insignia of the Legion of Honour. 
In 1898 he was appointed physician-extraordinary to Queen Victoria, and, 
later, physician-in-ordinary to King Edward. 
Besides these honours he received numerous academic distinctions, 
including the honorary LL.D. of the Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews, 
and Toronto, and the honorary D.Sc. of the University of Leeds. He was 
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the year 1897. 
That Broadbent was a man of high intellectual power and of great 
nobility of character is well known to his friends, and is evidenced by his 
career and also by the nature of the original medical and physiological work 
he did. His contributions to medical literature cover a wide and varied 
field. He was deeply interested in the study of the problems of diseases of 
the nervous system. One of his earliest publications dealing with this 
subject was an important paper entitled “The Sensori-Motor Ganglia and 
Association of Nerve Nuclei,’ in which he enunciated his memorable 
“hypothesis ” explaining the immunity from paralysis of bilaterally associated 
muscles in hemiplegia. In 1869 he published a paper on “ The Structure of 
the Cerebral Hemisphere,” in which he gave a description of the course of 
the various groups of nerve fibres in the cerebral hemisphere, based on 
a series of careful dissections which he had been carrying out for some 
years. In a lecture on “The Theory of Construction of the Nervous System,” 
delivered at Wakefield in 1876, he referred to these dissections, and gave 
