London Jews' Society in the metropolis, and took up his residence at Palestine Place, working among the Jews and superintending the ‘Wanderers' Home.’ He was made D.D. by the archbishop of Canterbury in 1881. He died at 5 Cambridge Lodge Villas, Mare Street, Hackney, on 13 May 1885, and was buried on the 18th in the City of London cemetery at Ilford. He married: first, on 2 April 1850, Charlotte Elizabeth, second daughter of Charles Henry Purday, of Hunter Street, Brunswick Square; her health compelled her to remain in England during his captivity, and she died on 1 Jan. 1874. He married, secondly, on 3 March 1883, Rebecca Davis, daughter of S. D. Goff, of Horetown, co. Wexford.
His works are: 1. ‘Dawnings of Light in the East: with Biblical, Historical, and Statistical Notices of Persons and Places in Persia, Coordistan, and Mesopotamia,’ 1854. 2. ‘Journal of a Missionary Journey into Arabia Felix,’ 1858. 3. ‘Wanderings among the Falashas in Abyssinia: together with a description of the Country and its various Inhabitants,’ 1862. 4. ‘The Captive Missionary: being an Account of the Country and People of Abyssinia,’ 1868. A number of Stern's letters were included in ‘Letters from the Captive Missionaries in Abyssinia’ (1866).
[Biography of the Rev. Henry Aaron Stern, D.D., by A. A. Isaacs, 1886; History of the Abyssinian Expedition, by Clements R. Markham, 1869; Abyssinian Captives: recent intelligence from H. A. Stern, edited by C. H. Purday, 1866; Times, 15 May 1885; information supplied by Colonel Prideaux, one of the captives.]
STERNE or STEARNE, JOHN (1624–1669), founder of the Irish College of Physicians, was born on 26 Nov. 1624 at Ardbraccan, the episcopal palace of his grand-uncle, James Ussher [q. v.], then bishop of Meath. His father, John Stearne, of Cambridge, who settled in co. Down and married Mabel Bermingham, a niece of Primate Ussher, was distantly connected with the family of Archbishop Richard Sterne [q. v.] Stearne entered Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of fifteen, in 1639, and obtained a scholarship in 1641. On the outbreak of the great Irish rebellion, Stearne fled to England, and in 1643 proceeded to Cambridge, where he studied medicine at Sidney-Sussex College, and collected material for his first work, ‘Animi Medela.’ He remained at Cambridge about seven years, and then spent some time at Oxford, where he was welcomed by Seth Ward [q. v.], then fellow of Wadham. Prior to his departure for England he had been elected a fellow of Trinity College (1643), a position from which he was ejected by order of the Rump. On his return to Ireland in 1651 he was restored to his fellowship by direction of Henry Cromwell, with whom he was on terms of friendship, and to whom he dedicated one of his books. In 1656 he was appointed the first Hebrew lecturer in the university, receiving the degree of M.D. in 1658, and that of LL.D. in 1660. In 1659 he resigned his fellowship (probably as a necessary preliminary to his marriage in that year to Dorothy, daughter of Charles Ryves), but was appointed to a senior fellowship in 1660, after the Restoration, receiving a dispensation from the statutes of the university respecting celibacy. He became in the same year professor of law. During his tenure of these various offices, Stearne practised as a physician in Dublin, obtaining special permission to reside outside the walls of the college.
Stearne is chiefly noticeable as the founder of the Irish College of Physicians. In 1660 he proposed to the university that Trinity Hall, situated in Back Lane, Dublin, then a college or hall affiliated to the university, of which he had been constituted president in 1654, should be set apart for ever as a college of physicians. The arrangement was sanctioned, and Stearne, on the nomination of the provost and senior fellows of Trinity College, in whom the appointment was vested, became its first president. No students were to be admitted who did not belong to Trinity College. The connection between the College of Physicians and Dublin University may still be traced in the gown of the officials of the former body, which is the same as that formerly worn by fellows of Trinity College. In 1662 Stearne was appointed for life professor of medicine in the university. In 1667 a charter was granted to the College of Physicians, under which a governing body of fourteen fellows was constituted—of whom Sir William Petty [q. v.] was one—with Stearne at their head as president for life. Stearne died in Dublin on 18 Nov. 1669 in his forty-fourth year, having done and written much in his comparatively short but active life. He was buried, by his own request, in the chapel of Trinity College, where his epitaph, by his friend Henry Dodwell the elder [q. v.], in which he is described as ‘Philosophus, Medicus, summusque Theologus idem,’ may still be read. He had issue three daughters and one son, John Sterne (1660–1745) [q. v.], afterwards bishop of Clogher, who presented a set of his father's works to Archbishop Marsh's library at Dublin.
