The president's address on the medical history of Carlisle : delivered at the Sixty-fourth Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, held in Carlisle, July, 1896 / by Henry Barnes.

  • Barnes, Henry.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The president's address on the medical history of Carlisle : delivered at the Sixty-fourth Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, held in Carlisle, July, 1896 / by Henry Barnes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    guished position as physicians in London. Dr. John Coning- ham was appointea Physician to the London Hospital in 1742; Dr. Addison Hutton was elected Pliysician to St. George's Hospital in 1736; Dr. John Kelph became Physician to Guy's Hospital in 1789 ; Dr. John Leake was the founder and first physician to the Westminster Lying-in Hospital ; Dr. Wjlliam Woodville, an accomplished medical botanist, was Physician to the London Small-Pox Hospital; and Dr. John Walker was the first resident vaccinator of the Jen- nerian Society. The most distinguished Cumberland physi- cians of that period were Dr. W illiam Bi'ownrigg and Dr. Heysham. The former was distinguished both as a chemist and as a physician. He began practice as a physician at Whitehaven in 1741. His researches in several particulars were parallel with those of Priestley, Black, and Cavendisli. Pie contributed several papers to the Philosophical Transactions, was a Fellow of the R(.)yal Society, and received the Copley medal for some chemical inquiries. He was a mental philosopher of great power, and his scien- tific attaintnents were acknowledged by the most eminent men of the day, by wluim he was held in high esteem. Dr. Heysham, although not a native of Cumberland, spent the whole of his medical life here, and his name is widely known as that of a distinguished phy- sician. Born at Lancaster in 1753, he settled in Carlisle in 1778, and died in 1834. He had only been here a few months when he meditated a censtis of the inhabitants and the framing of bills of mortality. By carefully recording from week to week and month to month the births, marriages, diseases, and deaths of the people he gradually accumulated the data upon wliich the Carlisle tables of mortality were based. At that time life assurance was in its infancy, and the value of Heysham's labours may best be exemplified by a reference to the serious errors which arose from incorrect observations and records made elsewhere. The credit of having drawn up the first English mortality tables belongs to a Unitarian preacher. Dr. Price, of Northampton. He employed the registers of births and deaths of the town in which he lived, but in constructing his tables he altogether overlooked the fact that a considerable number of Baptists ■ lived in the town who did not sanction infant baptism. This oversight led him to the conclusion that the population of Northampton was stationary, and he seriously underestimated the life duration of its inhabitants. Two illustrations of the importance of this error may be quoted. The Equitable Society, which first used the Northampton table, found that their mortality was one-third less than the table predicted. The Government also adopted the table as the basis of its annuity schemes, and the same error which gave the Equitable and other societies one-third too much pi-emium induced the Government to grant annuities which were larger by one- third than they should have been for the amount charged, and before the eiTor was rectified two millions of money were lost to the country by tliese annuity transactions. The value of the Carlisle tables was speedily recognised, and one by one the leading life assurance companies, both in this country and in America, adopted them as the basis of their calculation. Professor De Morgan in 1830 pronounced them to be the best existing tables of healthy life which have been constructed in England, and Dr. Farr, in the fifth