CHARLES B. GORING, 1870—1919. 
"His work won full recognition from those who value scientific research. But 
it is a strange commentary on the Civil Service, that, when so pressing a problem 
as prison reform still confronts us, so fine a woiker and so human a man should 
have been given but the (medical) administration of a great prison instead of being 
called in to deal with a work for which all his gifts supremely fitted him," The 
Nation. 
The late Charles B. Goring, M.D., was a distinguished student of University 
College, London, and afterwards a Fellow of that College. During his cai'eer his 
studies were far from confined to medicine : he was much interested in literature 
and philosophy, being awarded the John Stuart Mill Studentship in Philosophy of 
Mind and Logic in 1893, probably the only occasion on which that studentship 
has fallen to a medical exhibitioner*. It was not therefore surprising to those 
who knew something of the remarkable powers of sympathy, the width of interests 
and the facility of expression which characterised Goring to find that he would 
wi-ite a blue-book, as no blue-book has been written since the time of Matthew Arnold. 
He would handle facts, but at the same time he would appeal by his imagination 
and gift of language not only to the sociologist but to every man who is fascinated 
by the human spirit in all its diverse phases. Goring lived with his criminals, and 
studied them in and out of prison as the naturalist studies life in the field, and as 
the humanist studies manknid in its thronged resorts. Ask Goring what a convict's 
mind was like and he replied unhesitatingly : Like yours and mine. The same 
delicate spirit of sympathy that went out to his friends in both the joy and the 
sorrow of life, drew the criminal to him, and the link often grew so close that the 
prison medical officer became the father-confessor: the psychology of the criminal 
mind was laid bare, and thus Goring's insight into criminality, its source and its 
motives, grew deeper and more and more coordinated as the years of service increased. 
Yet he never hesitated to exhibit the same tender sympathy alike to each new 
sojourner and to each oft returning old prison inmate, while his own nature widened 
and strengthened under an environment which appears to dull the mentality of so 
many men in the prison service. Only last Christmas the present writer dis- 
cussed with him the possibility of a series of essays on the psychology of crime to 
be based indeed on facts acquired by scientific study, but to exhibit a structure 
from which the scaffolding should have been stript, and which should convince 
the beholder of the fitness of its purpose solely by the beauty and truth of its 
lines. The path to truth is an arduous one, but when we have reached the 
* Goring was awarded the Weldon Medal and premium by the University of Oxford in 1914 and 
never will a more fitting award of that medal be made ; his work "The English Convict " was undoubtedly 
the finest contribution to biometry of its quinquennium, 
Biometrika xii 20 
