186 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
his graduation as M.D. in 1880 his Alma Mater awarded him a gold medal and 
the Syme Surgical Fellowship, both of them highly coveted honours. He 
began to lecture outside the university at Surgeons’ Hall in 1883, and he 
continued to do so there till within a few days of his death. He always 
had a good class, and the thinkers among the undergraduates found in him 
a most inspiring teacher who spared no pains to make clear the funda- 
mental principles of obstetrics and gynecology. In 1884, when he was 
appointed Assistant Physician to the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital, 
and in 1886, when he became Assistant Gynecologist to the Royal Infirmary, 
the sphere of his activities was immensely enlarged and the clinical aspect 
of his speciality engaged his attention, with immediate results in his literary 
output, his contributions to the Obstetrical Society (of which he was 
President in 1890) coming to be of a more directly practical kind. He 
had been elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1880, and 
one of the posts which he held in his later years with great acceptance 
was that of the Librarianship of the College. He wrote two text-books 
which had each a large circulation and brought fame to the Edinburgh 
Medical School. One was his Guide to Midwifery , noteworthy for the 
novelty of its arrangement and views ; the other, in the writing of which he 
enjoyed the collaboration of his friend Dr Freeland Barbour, was the famous 
Manual of Gynecology , which did so much to establish Gynecology as a 
scientific speciality, and which was translated into three foreign languages. 
In addition to the honours which Dr Berry Hart received at home, 
there were the distinctions which were conferred upon him abroad : 
America made him an Honorary Fellow of her Gynecological Society, and 
Germany gave him similar distinctions. He was several times asked to 
open discussions at annual meetings of the British Medical Association, 
and he was widely recognised as one of Edinburgh’s most learned 
obstetricians. In addition to these many sides of his life there were 
others, such as his private practice in his speciality, his examining work 
both in Edinburgh and at other universities, and his post-graduate teach- 
ing ; but, above all, he impressed his fellows with the extraordinarily wide 
outlook of his mind upon all the problems of life, and especially upon those 
concerned with embryology and generation. He was an attractive speaker 
upon these subjects; his interest in them was intense; and he brought to 
their elucidation a contagious enthusiasm and an immense knowledge of 
recondite matters, the product of a lifetime of close reading of stimulating 
books in every department not only of medicine but of all the sciences. 
This personal equipment was easily recognised in the contribution which he 
made to the Proceedings of this Society on the subject of the “ free-martin.” 
