Abstract
SIR RICHARD THORNS THORNB, F.R.S., a notable hygienist of the Victorian era, was born on October 13, 1841, at Leamington, Warwickshire, the son of a banker. He received his early education at Neuwied in Prussia and at a Paris lyceé, and his medical training at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where he qualified in 1863. Eventually he was elected physician to the Royal Hospital for Diseases of the Chest and to the London Fever Hospital, and about this time he was employed by the Medical Department of the Local Government Board to make various reports. He first became widely known by his work on quarantine and the international relations for the prevention of the spread of disease from one country to another. From 1885 onward he attended many international sanitary congresses as a representative of the British Government, and in 1892 he succeeded Sir George Buchanan as principal medical officer of the Local Government Board. The subjects in which he was most interested were diphtheria, on the natural history and prevention of which he delivered the Milroy Lectures before the Royal College of Physicians in 1891; tuberculosis, the administiative control of which formed the subject of his Harben Lectures in 1899, and the establishment of isolation hospitals for infectious diseases. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1890 and was also an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Rome and a foreign associate of the French Society of Hygiene. His death took place suddenly on December 18, 1899.
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Sir Richard Thorne Thorne (1841–1899). Nature 148, 435 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148435a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148435a0