Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/287

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Burdon-Sanderson
267
Burdon-Sanderson

the degree of D.D. from the archbishop of Canterbury. On 15 March 1874 he was consecrated third bishop of Victoria, a diocese which until 1883 included Japan as well as all South China. At his own request his name was kept on the roll of C.M.S. missionaries, and he had sometimes to insist on the fact that he was a missionary, as well as a colonial, bishop. His episcopate was marked by ceaseless if unobtrusive work and boundless hospitality at Hong-kong and by arduous visitations in Fukien and elsewhere. He enjoyed the regard alike of the merchants of Hongkong and the missionaries in Fukien. He resigned the bishopric on 26 Jan. 1897, and retired to Pakhoi, where his missionary life closed. He left China in 1901, and his last years of failing health were spent with his youngest son in England. He died at Bedford on 5 Jan. 1907, and was buried at Royston. Burdon was married thrice: (1) on 30 March 1853 to Harriet Anne Forshaw who died at Shanghai on 26 Sept. 1854; (2) on 11 Nov. 1857 to Burella Hunter Dyer, who died on 16 Aug. 1858; (3) on 14 June 1865 to Phoebe Esther, daughter of E. T. Alder, vicar of Bungay; she died on 14 June 1898. By his third wife he had three sons.

[MS. notes and documents supplied by his youngest son, Edward Russell Burdon; MS. Register of C.M.S. Missionaries; Church Missionary Review, April 1907, pp. 227-236; E. Stock, History of the C.M.S., 3 vols., 1899; Notes on Hangchow Past and Present, by G. E. Moule, 1907.]


BURDON-SANDERSON, Sir JOHN SCOTT, first baronet (1828–1905), regius professor of medicine at Oxford, born at Jesmond, near Newcastle-on-Tyne, on 21 Dec. 1828, was second son and fourth child of Richard Burdon (1791–1865), at one time fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, who took the additional surname of Sanderson on his marriage in 1815 to Elizabeth, only daughter of Sir James Sanderson, first baronet, M.P. His father's mother, Jane, daughter of William Scott of Newcastle-on-Tyne, was sister of Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell. His sister Mary Elizabeth married Robert Haldane of Cloanden, and Viscount Haldane is her son. As a boy Burdon-Sanderson was educated at home and was intended by his father for the law, in which two great-uncles had won distinction. But the youth's strong interest in natural science pointed to medicine as a more appropriate profession, and entering the university of Edinburgh in 1847 he graduated M.D. in 1851, with the gold medal for his thesis on the meta-morphosis of the coloured blood corpuscles. Proceeding to Paris, he first studied chemistry under Gerhardt and Wurtz, and later devoted himself to physiology under the celebrated Claude Bernard and to hospital work.

In 1853 he settled in London as a practising physician, was soon appointed medical registrar of St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington, and in 1854 served the medical school there as lecturer, first in botany and then in medical jurisprudence. In 1856 he was appointed medical officer of health for Paddington, and during the eleven years of his tenure of the post gave the first proofs of eminence. Two outbreaks of cholera rendered reforms in the sanitation of the district imperative. Food adulteration and insanitary dwelling-houses were evils which his efforts greatly diminished. Dr. (afterwards Sir) John Simon [q. v. Suppl. II], the chief medical officer of the privy council, recognised his ability and scientific acumen, and in 1860 Burdon-Sanderson was made an inspector under the council. Official reports by him dealt with the etiology of various contagious and infectious diseases, and inaugurated the successful experimental study of them in this country. A laborious inquiry into the contagium of cattle plague (1865-6) and a report on the conditions determining tuberculosis were particularly illuminating. In 1869 he investigated an epidemic of cerebro-spinal meningitis in North Germany. In an article 'On the Intimate Pathology of Contagion,' forming an appendix to the report of the council for 1869, Burdon-Sanderson gave prophetic intimation of the causal relationship of specific micro-organisms to disease.

In 1860 he became physician at the Brompton Hospital for Consumption, and also at the Middlesex Hospital, and there pursued his investigations.

In 1867 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society and Croonian lecturer, taking for his subject the influence of respiratory movements on the circulation. The lecture embodied results of experimental study which, though strictly physiological, was suggested by his numerous sphygmographic and stethograpliic observations at Brompton Hospital (Phil. Trans, clvii.).

In 1870 he gave up his hospital appointments and private practice in order to devote himself exclusively to scientific research. He had retired from the privy council in 1865, and from Paddington in 1867. His opportunity of research was