1920-21.] Obituary Notices. 191 
Glasgow Universities. On the death of Sir William Gairdner in 1907, 
Sir Thomas Fraser succeeded him as Honorary Physician to His Majesty 
the King in Scotland, the honour of knighthood having previously been 
conferred on him in 1902. During the years 1900 to 1902 he filled the 
Presidential chair at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and 
discharged its duties with great efficiency. In 1913 he was elected a 
member of the Athenaeum Club under the special rule authorising the 
committee to elect nine members in each year because of their distinguished 
eminence in Science, Literature, or the Arts, or for public services. This 
distinction Sir Thomas Fraser highly appreciated. 
On retiring from his Professorship in 1919 he was laureated LL.D. of 
the Edinburgh University, and his portrait, painted by Mr Robert Home, 
was presented to him by a large number of his former students, colleagues, 
and professional friends. 
During his earlier years, Professor Fraser, though never very robust, 
was of a wiry constitution, and took great pleasure in many forms ’of 
outdoor exercise. But, as the years passed on, he suffered from repeated 
attacks of bronchitis which sapped his vitality, and rendered strenuous 
efforts difficult or impossible, and at the age of seventy he fractured his 
femur, thus rendering himself still less fit for physical exercise. For many 
years he spent his summer holidays at Druimbeg, a small country property 
which he purchased for himself on the shores of Loch Shiel in Argyllshire, 
where he delighted in showing hospitality to his friends, and where his 
garden, stocked with numerous plants of therapeutic interest and of beauty 
of foliage, gave him constant interest and pleasure. Whilst his strength 
enabled him, he also enjoyed the sports of trout-fishing, shooting, and hill- 
climbing, though he gradually had to abandon these amusements as his 
health became less satisfactory. To the end, however, his mind was as 
clear as ever, and when overtaken by his last illness he was busily engaged 
in working up the material which he had accumulated in the course of his 
long life of clinical and laboratory research. 
In many respects Sir Thomas Fraser’s position in the school was unique. 
He formed a link between the older ideals represented in Sir Robert 
Christison and the newer methods of separating the laboratory worker 
much more completely from the physician in charge of patients, and this 
change, though probably inevitable, is not without great drawbacks, for 
it eliminates much of the human element from the life-work of those who 
now guide the profession in therapeutic matters ; and although this permits 
of a higher degree of specialisation, it certainly debars the worker from 
that close contact with the problems confronting the practising physician 
