Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/143

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Davies
137
Davies

ing the Bombay military fund for his investigation and report, and from this period up to 1851 he was constantly consulted regarding the various Indian funds. He wrote no less than twenty reports on these Indian funds, each containing extensive insurance tables. He was also engaged from time to time for the Bank of England. On 16 June 1831, on the recommendation of Mr. Benjamin Gompertz, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. From about 1847 he suffered from a series of attacks of bronchitis. On 5 Dec. 1854 he was seized with a paralytic stroke, and died at 25 Duncan Terrace, Islington, London, 21 March 1855. He was married twice, and left a son and a daughter. Besides the works already mentioned he was also author of:

  1. ‘Report and Valuation for the Madras Medical Fund, with numerous tables for its future guidance.’
  2. ‘Tables for the Use of Friendly Societies, by J. Finlaison. The tables compiled by G. Davies,’ 1847.

[Assurance Mag. July 1855, pp. 337–48; Walford's Insurance Cyclopædia, ii. 172–4; Gent. Mag. May 1855, p. 534; Times, 26 March 1855, p. 7; Pink's Clerkenwell (1881 ed.), pp. 705–8.]

G. C. B.

DAVIES, HENRY, M.D. (1782–1862), physician, son of a surgeon, was born in London in 1782. He was apprenticed to a surgeon at Malling, Kent, and in 1803 was admitted a member of the College of Surgeons. He became a surgeon in the army, and after serving for several years, resigned his commission and took a house in London in 1817. He received the then easily obtained medical degree of the university of Aberdeen, 26 Sept. 1823, and became a licentiate of the College of Physicians of London 22 Dec. 1823. He gave up all practice but midwifery, became physician to the British Lying-in Hospital, and was also for some years lecturer on midwifery and the diseases of women and children in the medical school of St. George's Hospital. He edited a tenth edition of Dr. Michael Underwood's useful ‘Treatise on the Diseases of Children’ in 1846. His additions are marked by his initials, but they are rarely of much value, while he has spoiled the simplicity of the original work by numerous interpolations from other authors. He also published ‘The Young Wife's Guide,’ London, 1844. Deafness incapacitated him from practice in 1851, and he retired into the country, but returned to London in a year, and there died 9 Jan. 1862.

[Munk's Coll. of Phys. iii. 279; Lancet, 1862, i. 89.]

N. M.

DAVIES, HERBERT, M.D. (1818–1885), physician, son of Dr. Thomas Davies [q. v.], was born in London 30 Sept. 1818. After education at North End House School, Hampstead, he obtained a scholarship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1838, but migrated to Queens', and graduated B.A. as thirty-first wrangler in 1842. In 1843 he took the degree of M.B., was elected a fellow of Queens' College in 1844, and graduated M.D. in 1848, his thesis being ‘On the Origin of Gout.’ During these years he studied medicine at Paris and Vienna as well as in London, and was on 5 Aug. 1845 elected assistant-physician to the London Hospital. In 1850 he was elected a fellow of the College of Physicians, and in 1854 physician to the London Hospital, an office which he held for twenty years. He lectured in the medical school of that hospital first on materia medica, and afterwards on medicine, and he discharged at Cambridge the duties of examiner for medical degrees and of assessor to the regius professor of physic. He married Miss Wyatt on 24 Aug. 1850. They had seven children, and his second son graduated in medicine at Cambridge. Davies lived in Finsbury Square, London, was physician to the Bank of England, and had a considerable practice in the city. He had the merit of continuing to study his profession throughout life, while his kindly disposition and the entire absence of self-seeking which was observable in his conduct caused him to be liked as well as respected by his medical contemporaries. He contributed to the advance of medical anatomy by his observations on the relative magnitude of the areas of the four orifices of the heart, and may also claim to have improved medical treatment by his advocacy of the use of blisters to the swollen joints in acute rheumatism, a treatment in part superseded by the discovery of salicylate of soda, but still used with advantage in certain cases.

Besides several papers in the ‘London Hospital Reports’ and in the ‘Transactions of the Pathological Society,’ he published a useful manual entitled ‘Lectures on the Physical Diagnosis of the Diseases of the Lungs and Heart,’ London, 1851, which reached a second edition in 1854, and was translated into German and Dutch; and ‘On the Treatment of Rheumatic Fever in its Acute Stage, exclusively by free Blistering,’ London, 1864. His papers on the form and areas of the heart's orifices are in the ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society,’ 1870 and 1872.

He died at Hampstead 4 Jan. 1885, and is buried in the cemetery there.

[Information from family; personal knowledge; Luard's Graduati Cantab.]

N. M.