College of Physicians, having been elected a fellow in 1838, and having held the offices of censor in 1841, 1842, and 1854, lecturer on materia medica 1843–5, councillor 1846–8 and 1866–7, examiner 1861–2 and 1866–7, treasurer 1868–83, and vice-president in 1885. Before he resigned the office of treasurer he presented the college with a copious manuscript history of its proceedings, compiled by himself. He was one of the editors of the first ‘British Pharmacopœia,’ published by the General Medical Council (1864), and also joined in editing an abridgment of Pereira's ‘Materia Medica,’ published in 1865; greatly enlarged editions appeared in 1872 and 1874. He also published a paper on the ‘Treatment of Acute Pericarditis with Opium’ in the ‘St. Bartholomew's Hospital Reports’ for 1866, which recommends the disuse of the injurious mercurial treatment then in fashion. In 1870 he reached the limit of age allowed to physicians at St. Bartholomew's, and retired from active work, though still attending the College of Physicians. He was a successful lecturer and colloquial teacher, being clear and simple in style, and agreeable in manner. He had considerable private practice for many years in Montague Street, Russell Square. He died in Kensington on 9 Nov. 1886, in his eighty-second year. He married Miss Julia Lewis in 1848, by whom he had two daughters, who survive him.
[Lancet, 1886, ii. 1003; British Medical Journal, 1886, ii. 1001; information from Dr. Norman Moore.]
FARRE, JOHN RICHARD, M.D. (1775-1862), physician, son of Richard John Farre, a medical practitioner, was born on 31 Jan. 1775 in Barbadoes. After school education in the island he studied medicine under his father, and in 1792 came to England and studied medicine for a year at the school then formed by the united hospitals of St. Thomas’s and Guy’s. At the end of 1793 he became a member of the corporation of surgeons, and went with Mr. Foster, surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, to France in Lord Moira’s expedition. After the expedition failed he came back to London, and afterwards entered practice in the island of Barbadoes. In 1800 he returned to England, studied for two years in Edinburgh, and took the degree of M.D. at Aberdeen on 22 Jan. 1806. He became licentiate of the College of Physicians of London on 31 March 1806, and began practice as a physician. He was one of the founders of the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital, to which he was physician for fifty years. His house was in Charterhouse Square, and he had two sons who attained distinction in medicine, Dr. Frederick John Farre [q. v.] and Dr. Arthur Farre [q.v.]. He edited Dr. Jones’s book on 'Arterial and Secondary Hæmorrhage' in 1805, and 'Saunders on Diseases of the Eye' in 1811. He also edited the 'Journal of Morbid Anatomy, Ophthalmic Medicine and Pharmaceutical Analysis.' He paid close attention to morbid anatomy and wrote 'The Morbid Anatomy of the Liver,' 4to, London, 1812-15, and 'Pathological Researches on Malformations of the Human Heart,' London, 1814. This valuable work contains an account of nearly all the cases recorded in England up to its date, and of several observed by the author himself. His specimens, with others, illustrative of other parts of morbid anatomy, are preserved in the museum of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, to which they were presented by his sons. His portrait, by Thomas Phillips, R.A., is to be seen in the board-room of the Ophthalmic Hospital in Moorfields, London. He retired from practice in 1856, died on 7 May 1862, and is buried at Kensal Green.
[Munk’s Coll of Phys. iii. 33; a Descriptive Catalogue of the Anatomical and Pathological Museum of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, 1884, vol.ii]
FARREN, ELIZABETH, Countess of Derby (1759?-1829), actress, was the daughter of George Farren, a surgeon and apothecary in Cork, and his wife, a Miss Wright of Liverpool, variously described as the daughter of a publican and of a brewer. That Farren, who joined a company of strolling players, was a man of some ability is shown by an irreverent quatrain concerning his manager, Shepherd, which was transcribed by John Bernard (Retrospections, i. 332). At a very early age Elizabeth Farren, whose Christian name was sometimes shortened to Eliza, played at Bath and elsewhere in juvenile parts. In 1774 she was acting with her mother and sisters at Wakefield under Tate Wilkinson’s opponent, Whiteley. She played Columbine and sang between the acts of the previous tragedy (Wandering Patentee, i. 201). When fifteen years of age she played at Liverpool Rosetta in ‘Love in a Village,’ and subsequently her great part of Lady Townly. Introduced by Younger, her Liverpool manager, to Colman, she made her first appearance in London at the Haymarket, 9 June 1777, as Miss Hardcastle. She was favourably received, and, after enacting Maria in Murphy’s ‘Citizen,’ Rosetta, and Miss Tittup in Garrick’s ‘Bon Ton,’ she was trusted by Colman, 30 Aug. 1777, with Rosina in the ‘Spanish Barber, or the Useless Precaution,’ his adaptation from Beaumarchais. She also
