XI 



Sm THOMAS EIGHAED FEASEE, 1841-1919. 



■Sir Thomas E. rRASER, M.D., F.E.S., and F.E.S.E., died at his residence in 

 Edinburgh on January 4, 1920, in his eightieth year. Only sixteen months 

 -previously he had relinquished his Professorship of Materia Medica, in 

 Edinburgh University, which he had held since 1877. 



He was born in 1841, in India, a country to which he was destined to 

 return, many years later, as member and President of a Plague Commission. 

 His early education was obtained at private schools and was succeeded by his 

 ■entrance as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh. As a student 

 in that university he had come under the influence of Sir Lyon Playfair, 

 Professor Hughes Bennet, Sir James Y. Simpson, and Sir Eobert Christison, 

 who, together with other members of the medical faculty, formed at that 

 time a galaxy of talent probably never excelled in the history of any British 

 medical school. It may well have been owing to such inspiring influences 

 that many who had the advantage of studying in that era were destined to 

 make their names worthy of a place amoagst those of their renowned 

 teachers. The most eminent toxicologist of his time, Sir Eobert Christison, 

 impressed his students by his exceptional power of observation and deduction 

 coupled with the resources of the widest knowledge of the action of drugs, 

 whether as poisons or as therapeutic agents ; but he lived and taught before 

 the analytical methods of pharmacology had been satisfactorily established. 

 Thus, whilst his description of his own symptoms, subjective and objective, 

 ■occasioned by a toxic drug of unascertained action (the Calabar ordeal bean) 

 is extraordinarily exact and instructive, it was not to be at his hands that the 

 ■elucidation of these effects was to be accomplished, but by the subsequent 

 work of Eraser, who subjected the poison which had occasioned them to 

 exhaustive pharmacological research. 



This experience of Christison's, which but for his presence of mind, might 

 have ended in disaster, occurred in 1855, and seven years later Eraser offered 

 for graduation a thesis entitled " The Action and Uses of the Calabar Bean." 

 He had still to devote much thought and experimentation to the subject, but 

 on this, his first comprehensive investigation, his title to be ranked among the 

 pioneers of pharmacology may justly be founded. Christison was not slow in 

 recognising the early promise thus displayed by his former pupil, who 

 became his Assistant in the University Department of Materia Medica, in 

 the year subsequent to the appearance of the thesis. During his tenure of 

 this position Dr. Eraser made farther advances in investigating the action of 

 •drugs, especially of Calabar bean. Working largely with the extract 

 containing the alkaloid, physostigmihe (often refeired to also as eserine), he 

 recognised the altered condition of vision it occasioned, the failure of motor- 

 •cord conduction, as well as of cardiac and respiratory activity, and he 

 indicated its application to ophthalmic practice, to the treatment of toxic 



