Bastian, Henry Charlton (1837-1915)

2 autographed letters by Henry Charlton Bastian. Correspondances include: Jabez Hogg (1817- 1899), ophthalmic surgeon (no.1); Dr John Milner Fothergill (1841-1888), physician (no.2)

1875-1884

1 file (2 items)

Presented by Mrs. Fothergill, September 1927 (acc.67370); Provenance details not recorded (acc.67430)

Henry Charlton Bastian (1837-1915), physician and neurologist, educated in University College, London, he obtained his MD in 1866. He first worked for St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, as assistant physician and lecturer in pathology. Bastian returned to University College as professor of pathological anatomy in 1867, and became a physician to University College Hospital in 1878. He held another senior post, as physician in nervous diseases at the National hospital, Queen Square, from 1868 to 1902. He also held the chair of medicine at University College Hospital from 1887 to 1898.

Bastian held a deep fascination with natural history and became an authority on free nematode worms and named over 100 new species in his monograph The Anguillulidae in 1864, but had to abandon this work at the age of thirty one due to developing an allergy to the worms. His reputation in medicine was made in the late 1860s by the neurological studies of aphasias and other speech disorders. His standing in medicine was not harmed when he became the British champion of "spontaneous generation of life" and a leading opponent of the germ theory of disease. However, as support for spontaneous generation faded and germ theory gained more supporters in the medical profession, Bastian's influence waned.

His first major publication in neurology was the identification of a degenerated tract in the spinal cord, later named after Sir William Gowers. In 1869 he published a seminal paper on various forms of speech loss and their relation to cerebral disease. His approach to aphasias was based on the idea that independent centres in the brain controlled speech and vision. His views were set out in The Brain as an Organ of Mind (1880), On Paralyses: Cerebral, Bulbar and Spinal (1886), and On Various Forms of Hysterical or Functional Paralysis (1893).

Bastian regarded his true life's work and achievement as the studies he made on the origins of life. His advocacy of spontaneous generation in support of the theory of evolution eventually marginalised him yet he regularly defended himself in print and public meetings. He completed three books on the subject in the 1870s: The Modes of Origin of Lowest Organisms (1871), The Beginnings of Life (1872), and Evolution and the Origin of Life (1874). Bastian remained committed to these views after his retirement in 1900 and continued to his death in 1915 publishing his work on spontaneous generation.

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