SYDNEY RINGER, 1835—1910. 



Sydney Ren t ger, who died at Lastingham, in Yorkshire, on October 14, 1910, 

 was the son of John and Harriet Ringer, of Norwich, where he was born in 

 1835. He was educated at private schools, and at the age of 19 entered, as 

 a medical student, University College, London, with which institution he 

 was to remain connected during the remainder of his active life. At the 

 hospital connected with that school he was successively House Physician, 

 Eesident Medical Officer (1861), Assistant Physician (1863), full Physician 

 (1866), and Consulting Physician (on his retirement in 1900) ; and in the 

 Faculty of Medicine of University College he held successively the chairs of 

 Materia Medica and Therapeutics, of Medicine and of Clinical Medicine. 

 The School of Medicine with which Ringer was associated has produced many 

 distinguished clinicists, but it may be safely affirmed that it has produced no 

 better clinical teacher than the subject of this memoir. It was not, 

 however, on the ground of his clinical reputation that Ringer was elected a 

 Fellow of the Royal Society, and it is not in the notices of this Society that 

 his eminence as a clinicist need be accentuated. For Ringer was more than a 

 great physician, much as that may mean : he was a scientific enquirer. His 

 bent in that direction showed itself early, for even while still a student of 

 medicine he presented a paper to the Royal Society, " On the Alteration of 

 the Pitch of Sound by Conduction through different Media," and others to 

 the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society on Metabolism in Disease. These 

 were followed by an investigation (conducted jointly with A. P. Stuart) into 

 the diurnal variations of temperature in the human body, which was, 

 however, not published in full until 1878. The subject of this enquiry, from 

 its bearing on the variations of temperature in fever, never lost interest for 

 him. But his appointment to the chair of Materia Medica and Therapeutics 

 directed his attention towards the action of medicinal substances and 

 agencies. His experiences of their action on the human body he embodied in 

 his well-known ' Handbook of Therapeutics,' of which a very large number of 

 editions have appeared ; no more thoroughly practical handbook of treatment 

 has probably ever been written. Ringer, however, recognised tbat it is 

 necessary for the understanding of the action of remedies in disease for their 

 action in health first to be determined, and that, to comprehend their effects 

 upon the body generally, their influence upon the individual organs and 

 tissues must be understood. There was then no laboratory of pharmacology 

 in London, but he found the opportunity for carrying out researches of this 

 nature in the Physiological Laboratory of University College, where a place 

 was always at his disposal. Here, in the intervals of a busy consulting 

 practice, he carried out the remarkable series of researches on the action of 



