xxii Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



active part in the foundation of the Historical Section of the Eoyal Society 

 of Medicine, and of the Fellowship of Medicine, started during the war to 

 facilitate post-graduate work for officers and colleagues from overseas. He 

 presided over the Medical Section of the International Medical Congress at 

 its meeting in London in 1913, and it was obvious that members from all 

 lands, who attended the Congress, gathered round him not merely as 

 appreciative colleagues but as personal friends. Soon after he came to Oxford, 

 Osier suggested the formation of the Association of Physicians of Great 

 Britain and Ireland, a body of clinical teachers which has done much for the 

 advancement of scientific medicine, and in bringing together the staffs of the 

 various medical schools of these kingdoms. He also was one of the founders, 

 and until his death the senior editor, of the ' Quarterly Journal of Medicine.' 



Throughout his career Osier made many contributions to medical literature. 

 His earliest published writings were the outcome of his microscopic work, 

 and dealt with Canadian Diatomaceae and the platelets of the blood, which 

 he was one of the first to describe. The first to observe them was 

 Max Schultze in 1865. Osier showed, in a paper published in the ' Pro- 

 ceedings of the Koyal Society,' in 1874, that the clusters which Schultze had 

 described were formed by the aggregation of separate particles which 

 circulated as such in the blood. Some ten years later, Bizzozero gave them 

 the name of platelets, and indicated the part which they play in thrombus 

 formation. 



In 1877 Osier described a verminous bronchitis occurring in dogs, and the 

 causative organism which is sometimes spoken of as Filaria Osleri. He fell 

 into the error, however, of classifying the organism as a strongylus, whereas 

 it is a filaria. 



Many of his papers are records of individual cases ; the earlier ones are 

 mainly pathological, but, after a time, clinical papers are included, and, in 

 the end, predominate. They reflect the subjects which were occupying his 

 attention from time to time, such as the prodromal rashes of small-pox, 

 miners' lung, the changes in the blood in disease, and the forms of splenic 

 enlargement. Not a few papers treat of arterial diseases, of aneurysm, and 

 malignant endocarditis, which last he chose as the subject of his Gulstonian 

 Lectures, delivered at the Eoyal College of Physicians in 1885. 



The clinical papers cover a large part of the field of medicine. Tuberculosis, 

 syphilis, chorea, the cerebral palsies of children, congenital heart disease, 

 pulmonary fibrosis, congenital malformations, ochronosis, gastric and duodenal 

 iilcers, typhoid fever and its complications, malaria and cerebro-spinal fever 

 are among the subjects of which they treat. Some subjects recur at intervals, 

 such as the visceral lesions of the erythema group. Vacquez first described 

 a case of polycythsemia rubra, but it was Osier who recognised it as a 

 definite clinical entity, and it is often connected with his name. An 

 hereditary malady, characterised by multiple telangiectases associated with 

 haemorrhages, may rightly be styled Osier's disease. The knowledge embodied 

 in these papers, which cover so wide a range, formed an admirable ground- 



