Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 11.djvu/31

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
Cleghorn
25
Cleghorn

afresh. He was afterwards employed by the Portuguese government as an engineer, and in that capacity reconstructed the mint at Lisbon, and executed several other public works. On his return to England railway works engaged his attention, but unfortunately he became fascinated with the atmospheric system. Its entire failure as a practicable plan of useful locomotion was a great blow to him, and he never after took any very active part in public affairs. He was appointed by the government one of the surveying officers for conducting preliminary inquiries on applications for new gas bills, and he occupied his spare time in contributing to the elaborate treatise on manufacture of coal gas published by his son in 1850. He became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1829, and took a prominent part in the discussions at its meetings. He died at Fairfield House, Adelaide Road, Haverstock Hill, Middlesex, 8 Jan. 1861.

Samuel Clegg, the younger, only son of the above, born at Westminster 2 April 1814, was employed as an assistant engineer on the Greenwich, Great Western, and Eastern Counties (afterwards the Great Eastern) lines, and as resident engineer on the Southampton and Dorchester railway in 1844. Previously to this he had made a trigonometrical survey of part of the Algarves in Portugal in 1836. He was appointed professor of civil engineering and architecture at Putney College in 1849, and in the same year lecturer on civil engineering to the royal engineers at Chatham, which latter post he held to his death. In 1855 he was sent by the government to Demerara to report upon the sea walls there, and to superintend the works for their restoration. He died at Putney, Surrey, 25 July 1856, aged only forty-two. At the time of his decease he was engaged in maturing a plan for removing all the gas manufactories in London to a considerable distance from the metropolis, and concentrating them at a spot on the Essex shore. He was author of a treatise on coal-gas, 1850.

[Minutes of Proceedings of Institution of Civil Engineers, i. 138 (1841), xvi. 121–4 (1857), xxi. 552–4 (1862).]

G. C. B.

CLEGHORN, GEORGE, M.D. (1716–1789), physician, born at Granton, near Edinburgh, on 18 Dec. 1716, was the youngest of five children. He began his education in the grammar school of his native parish of Cramond, and entered the university of Edinburgh as a student of physic under Dr. Alexander Monro in 1781, and lived in his house. In the same year, when Dr. Fothergill went to Edinburgh, he made Cleghorn's acquaintance, and they became friends and correspondents for life. In 1736 Cleghorn was appointed surgeon to the 22nd regiment of foot, then stationed in Minorca, and he remained in that island till Offarrell's regiment was ordered to Dublin in 1749. Cleghorn had corresponded in Latin with Fothergill on the medical observations which he made in Minorca, and on his return from the Mediterranean was persuaded by his friend to collect and arrange the contents of those letters. The work was ready for the press in 1750, and while Cleghorn was superintending its publication in London he attended the anatomical lectures of Dr. William Hunter. The book appeared in 1751, and is called 'Observations on the Epidemical Diseases in Minorca from the year 1744 to 1749.' After an introduction, giving a general account of the climate, natives, and natural history of the island, with meteorological tables and lists of the plants and animals, with the native names of the several species, Cleghorn summarises his observations on the diseases of the natives and of the British troops in seven chapters. These are all full of original observation, and entitle the book to a permanent place among English medical treatises. The author made many post-mortem examinations, and a copy of his book in the library of the College of Physicians, which belonged to Dr. Matthew Baillie, bears internal evidence that the great morbid anatomist valued it. Cleghorn recognised the fact that many otherwise inexplicable statements in the Hippocratic writings become clear when studied by the light of clinical observations on the Mediterranean coasts, and that the obscurity depends upon the circumstance that diseases, both acute and chronic, are there often modified in a way rarely seen in the north, by their concurrence with malarial fever. The pathology of enteric fever and acute pneumonia was unknown in Cleghorn's time, but his book gives a clear account of the course of enteric fever complicated with tertian ague, with dysentery, and with pneumonia, and he keeps so strictly to what he really observed at the bedside, that the usefulness of his observations is scarcely impaired by the facts that he regarded the incidental pleurisy as the chief feature of inflammation of the lungs, and that he held the doctrine forty years later demolished by Baillie, that polypus of the heart was a frequent cause of death. Any one going to practise in Minorca may still read Cleghorn's book with profit. Four editions were published during the author's lifetime, and a fifth with some unwarrantable alterations in 1815. Cleghorn settled in Dublin in 1751, and began to give lectures in anatomy, and a few years later was made first lecturer