William Whiteman Carlton Topley / address by Sir Henry Dale a the memorial service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, on Thursday, February 3rd, 1944.

  • Henry Hallett Dale
Date:
[1944]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: William Whiteman Carlton Topley / address by Sir Henry Dale a the memorial service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, on Thursday, February 3rd, 1944. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    % ' yt bt. wWartin-in-the-Fields Church, on Thursday, February 3rd, 1944. By the sudden death, in his 58th year, of William Whiteman Cariton Topley, his friends, his country and the world of science have suffered grievous loss. So much had seemed to Gepend on the normal expectation that he would continue, through many yet of tne difficult years ahead, to render to Science and to the Nation the great services for which his special endowments of ability and character had hecome so clear to all. We are here to pay our tribute of affection to the memory of our friend and colleague, and to honour a life of great achievement and selfless devotion, which has closed so early. What then shall we briefly recall of him, and how commemorate the great work which he has left unfinished? We may first recall what seemed, in 1927, to be his great opportunity and the opening of his main life's work, when we acclaimed his appointment, still in the full vigour and brilliance of his early maturity, as the first Professor and Director of Bacteriology and Immunology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was to hold this Chair long enough, indeed, to confirm and far to surpass the high hopes of those who had known his great qualities beforehand. Those who were directly his pupils there, felt the stimulus and the lasting influence of his teaching; and this was extended to a much wider circle by the great book on The Principles of Bacteriology and Immunity, which he wrote there in joint authorship with his intimate colleague, Professor Wilson. Then we shall recall the imposing record of his researches during this period; the masterly series by which, in co-operative enterprise with Professor Greenwood, he made so great an addition to knowledge of the conditions governing the natural spread and subsidence of an infection in a community, and gave to epidemiology a new and powerful method of experimental enquiry; and the more recent series, cut short by the war, in which he had attracted the interest of other colleagues to the preparation from bacteria of purified and stable antigens, and to the chemical study of their nature. The practical trial of some of these was even in hand when the war intervened. The war, indeed, had already cast its advancing Shadow over the last few years of this all too brief, though | m0
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