Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/464

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NAME
442
NAME

GIRDWOOD 442 GLASGOW bonic acid in coal gas upon the public healtti in England, the United States and Canada, the results of which were reported to the Royal Society. He was a large-minded man of great attainment, and cherished to the day of his death the ambition to obtain legisla- tion which would place the profession of chemistry on a footing equal to that of medi- cine. Dr. Girdwood was the son of Dr. G. F. Girdwood, and was born in London, England, October 22, 1832; he was educated at a pri- vate school, and later at University CoUeae and St. George's Hospital. He took the diploma of M. R. C. S. in 1854 and served for a time as house surgeon in the Liverpool Infirmary. He was gazetted assistant surgeon of Her Majesty's Grenadier Guards and ac- companied the First Battalion to Canada in 1862, at the time of the Trent affair. When the battalion returned to England, two years later, Dr. Girdwood retired from the army and settled in practice in Montreal, and in the following year took the degrees of M. D., C. M. at McGill University. He was for some years surgeon of the 3rd Victoria Rifles, and saw service with that regiment during the Fenian outbreak. Shortly afterwards he was promoted to be a medical staff' officer of the militia of Canada. In 1869 Dr. Girdwood was appointed lec- turer in practical chemistry in the Faculty of Medicine, McGill University; in 1872 he became professor of practical chemistry, and two years later professor of chemistry. When he retired from this chair in 1902 he was named emeritus professor of chemistry. He was surgeon to the Montreal Dispensary and to the General Hospital, and later became consulting surgeon to these institutions, and to the Children's Memorial Hospital. He was. also consulting physician in the X-ray depart- ment of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, and chief medical officer of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Dr. Girdwood occupied a number of other important positions, among them the presidency of the Roentgen Society of America, and the vice-presidency of the Canadian Branch of the Society of Chemical Industry. He was a fellow of the Chemical Society and of the Chemical Institute of Great Britain. He was also one of the original fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, which was organized in 1882. Dr. Girdwood will be remembered as a con- spicuous figure among the scientific men of Canada during the last quarter of the nine- teenth century — an example of the all-round scientist that will become rarer in this age of specialization; for, though fundamentally a chemist, he had a sound knowledge of medi- cine, surgery, medical jurisprudence, botany, physics, and microscopical technique, including photomicrography. The Rodgers and Gird- wood method of detecting strychnine was de- vised by Dr. Girdwood and Dr. Rodgers of London, and it was Dr. Girdwood also who first applied reagents for the detection .-jf forgeries, counterfeits, and the identification of handwriting. He was one of the first to apply the stereoscopic principles to X-ray prints. He was actively engaged in medical educa- tion from the time of his resignation from the Guards and was an interesting teacher both of clinical surgery in the hospital and of chemistry in the university. His name will always be associated with the development of chemical teaching in McGill University. The introduction of practical chemistry as an in- tegral part of a medical student's education in Canada was first carried out by Dr. Girdwood in some classes which he gave to the medical students of McGill University about 1870, the classes being held in his own home. British Med. Jour., 1917, vol. ii, 814-815. Trans. Royal Soc. of Canada, 3s, 1918, vol. xii, pp. 7-10. Portrait. Glasgow, William Carr (1845-1907) William Carr Glasgow, one of the founders of the American Laryngological Association and its president in 1890, was born in St. Louis on January 16, 1845, and graduated from the St. Louis Medical College and also from .the University of Vienna. He held the chairs of clinical medicine and laryngology at Wash- ington University, and was consulting phy- sician to the City Hospital of St. Louis and the Martha Parsons Hospital for Children. He was an original thinker and writer and his essay on "Cellular Infiltration of the Lungs" first described with exactness the physical signs and symptoms of influenza, call- ing it septic cellular edema. In 1887 he pointed out certain measures for the relief of congestive headache, the condi- tion which came into prominence in the rhino- logical world as nasal headache. In 1885 he wrote on "rhinitis nervosa." In 1887, in a paper entitled "The Etiology and Mechanism of Asthma," he pointed out the interarytenoid membrane as the starting-point of the asth- matic reflex in some instances. He wrote on laryngological topics, on aneurysm of the aorta, on congestive headache, and on other subjects for the medical journals. Dr. Glasgow married, in 1877, Fanny Eng-