XXIV 



FRANCIS ARTHUR BAINBRIDGE, 1874-1921. 



In the death of Francis Arthur Bainbridge, at the early age of 47 years, 

 Physiology has lost an enthusiastic and successful investigator and a teacher 

 of ability and influence. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal 

 Society in 1919, and it was but a few months later that he showed the first 

 definite signs of the ill-health, which culminated in a brief, acute illness, and 

 death on October 27, 1921. 



Bainbridge entered the Leys School with a scholarship in 1888, and 

 passed from there in 1893 with an entrance exhibition to Trinity College, 

 Cambridge, of which foundation he subsequently became a major scholar. 

 His student career was on normal lines for a man of his ability and studious 

 habit, but, on finishing the Natural Sciences Tripos, in both parts of which he 

 was placed in the first class, he left Cambridge for St. Bartholomew's 

 Hospital, shaping his course with a view to the practice of medicine. After 

 qualification, he held several minor appointments in physiology and pathology, 

 while waiting for opportunities of advance in the career which he had then 

 chosen ; but his natural bent was already obvious, in the devotion of the 

 time which he could spare from his official duties to research in physiology, 

 which he carried on in the physiological laboratory at University College. 



In this period he made a series of investigations into the mechanism of 

 lymph-formation, which brought clearly into view the influence of activity 

 in gland cells on the outpouring of lymph from the blood-vessels of the 

 gland. These and other phenomena of lymph-formation, which some had 

 regarded as indicating a process of active secretion by the capillary endo- 

 thelium, he brought into harmony with Starling's simpler physical con- 

 ception, producing ingenious experimental evidence in support of that point 

 of view. He became active also in the new field of investigation opened up 

 by Bayliss and Starling's discovery of Secretin, which was made at this time. 

 Bainbridge, however, unable as yet to give to physiology an undivided 

 allegiance, had neither the time nor the impulse to acquire that full command 

 of specialised technique and experience needed for an essentially biochemical 

 investigation. When eventually, in 1905, he abandoned the idea of medical 

 practice, it was to accept the Gordon Lectureship on Pathology at Guy's. 

 Here, with A. P. Beddard, he began a series of elegant experiments on the 

 secretion of urine by the frog's kidney, which he resumed on his return to 

 physiology in later years. With Beddard also he effected a useful revision of 

 then current views as to the meaning of the sequela? of partial nephrectomy. 



Bainbridge left Guy's in 1907, and, wandering for some years yet further 

 from physiology, was responsible, at the Lister Institute, for valuable 

 contributions to the study and classification of the paratyphoid and food- 

 poisoning group of bacilli. This work formed later the basis of his Milroy 

 Lectures to the Royal College of Physicians. 



