Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol I (1901).djvu/407

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Burrows
345
Burrows

or fifteen days. From that time to the present the history of the Cunard Company would be the history of the growth and development of steam navigation, in the very van of which it has all along been distinguished by the excellence of its ships and of the general management. The original shareholders were gradually bought out till the whole was vested in the three families of Cunard, Burns, and McIver, and so it continued for many years, the Cunards managing its affairs in America, the brothers David and Charles McIver in Liverpool, and George and James Burns in Glasgow. Having acquired a princely fortune, George retired from the active management in 1860, purchased the estate of Wemyss Bay, and spent the remainder of his life mainly at Castle Wemyss, where he died on 2 June 1890. The year before he had been made a baronet. To the last he preserved his faculties, could read without spectacles, and took a lively interest in public affairs, as well as in the management of his own. He married in 1822 Jane, daughter of James Cleland [q.v.], by whom he had seven children, of whom only two—sons—survived.

John, the elder son, succeeded his father in the management of the business; and when, in 1880, it was converted into an open limited liability company, he was appointed its chairman. In 1897 he was raised to the peerage as Lord Inverclyde; he died on 12 Feb. 1901, and his wife Emily, daughter of George Clerk Arbuthnot, on the following day, both being buried on 16 Feb. at Wemyss Bay.

[Men of the Time (12th ed.); Times, 3 June 1890; Fortunes made in Business, ii. 330 et seq.; Lindsay’s Hist. of Merchant Shipping, iv. 179 et seq.]

J. K. L.

BURROWS, Sir GEORGE, first baronet (1801–1887), physician, was a scion of an old Kentish family of yeomen, and the eldest son of George Man Burrows, M.D., F.R.C.P., of Bloomsbury Square, London, by his wife Sophia, second daughter of Thomas Druce of Chancery Lane. Born in Bloomsbury Square on 28 Nov. 1801, he was educated for six years at Ealing, under Dr. Nicholas, where he had Cardinal Newman for a schoolfellow. After leaving school, in 1819 he attended the lectures of John Abernethy [q. v.], his future father-in-law, at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and other courses delivered by Professors Brande and Faraday at the Royal Institution. He was admitted scholar of Caius College, Cambridge, on 7 Oct. 1820, graduating B.A. in 1825 (tenth wrangler), M.B. in 1826, and M.D. in 1831. He also carried off the Tancred medical studentship. While at Cambridge he was well known as a cricketer, and distinguished himself as an oarsman; he organised and pulled stroke in the first six-oar racing boat that floated on the Cam. He was junior fellow and mathematical lecturer of Caius College from 1825 to 1835.

Returning to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital from Cambridge, Burrows studied as a dresser under Sir William Lawrence [q. v.], and as clinical clerk under Dr. Peter Mere Latham [q. v.] Soon afterwards he travelled with a patient on the continent, and studied at Pavia and in France and Germany. He passed six months in Paris in the anatomical schools under Breschet, and while in Italy studied under Scarpa and Panezza.

In 1829 Cambridge University granted him a license to practise, and he was admitted in the same year an inceptor candidate at the College of Physicians. He had seen and studied cholera in Italy, and in 1832, during the great cholera epidemic in London, he was placed by the governors of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in charge of an auxiliary establishment. At the end of 1832 he was appointed joint lecturer on medical jurisprudence at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital with Dr. Roupell, and in 1834 sole lecturer on this subject. His first lecture on forensic medicine, which was separately printed, was published in the ‘London Medical and Surgical Journal’ for 4 Feb. 1832. In 1836 he was made joint lecturer on medicine with Dr. Latham, and in 1841 succeeded as sole lecturer. His lectures were plain, judicious, and complete. In 1834 he was appointed the first assistant physician to the hospital, with the charge of medical out-patients, and was promoted full physician in 1841; he held this post until 1863, when he was placed on the consulting staff. On this occasion he was presented with a testimonial by his colleagues. He was for many years physician to Christ’s Hospital. He joined the Royal College of Physicians as a member in 1829, and was elected a fellow in 1832. In that institution he subsequently delivered the Gulstonian (1834), Croonian (1835–6), and Lumleian lectures (1843–4). He held the office of censor in 1839, 1840, 1843, and 1846, of councillor for five periods of three years between 1838 and 1870, and from 1860 to 1869 was the representative of the college in the General Medical Council; he was one of the treasurers from 1860 to 1863, and was president from 1871 to 1875. In 1846 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1872 received the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford, and in 1881