In memoriam, Daniel John Leech, J.P., M.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.P.

  • Wild, Robert Briggs.
Date:
[1900]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: In memoriam, Daniel John Leech, J.P., M.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.P. 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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    in Manchester, was added to our number. For several years our little Society prospered, and it was with very great regret that we found ourselves at length too fully occupied to continue it, for to all of us its meetings had been a means of much pleasure and of much educational advantage. I have lingered upon these early associations, because I understand that it is desired that I should touch chiefly in these remarks upon the earlier part of my friend’s career, and recall incidents which are necessarily, in point of time, beyond the knowledge of most readers of the Chronicle. Leech’s indefatigable energy and public spirit led him to take an active interest in many organisations—educational, sanitary, philanthropic, and otherwise ; but it may, I think, truly be said that amongst all these Owens College held, during the whole of his mature life, the first place in his affections. He was never weary in his efforts to promote its interests : he gave time, thought, and money ungrudgingly, and lost no opportunity of pleading its cause with his wealthier neighbours. He remembered with lifelong gratitude the insight into scientific methods, the glimpse into an entirely new world, that he had gained during the two years that he had attended classes in the old College in Quay Street; and he felt that no service he could render in after life was too great to express his sense of indebtedness for that altogether invaluable, and at the time exceptional, experience. This consciousness of what he himself owed to his early familiarization with practical scientific work, led him, at the time the regulations of the Victoria University were being formulated, to support very strenuously, in the face of much opposition, the proposal to institute, for all medical graduates, an examination somewhat corresponding to the Preliminary Scientific Examination of the University of London. In other words, he strove, with all the energy of profound conviction, to ensure that every medical graduate of the new University should have had some good practical instruction in the collateral sciences of chemistry, biology, and physics. It has been fortunate for the reputation of the University that he, and those of us who agreed with him, carried our point. Of Leech’s greatest achievement, the organisation and develop-