Henry Thompson

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Sir Henry Thompson

Sir Henry Thompson, 1st Baronet (born August 6, 1820 in Framlingham ( Suffolk ), † April 18, 1904 in London ) was a British surgeon . He specialized in the field of urology and successfully lithotripsed the Belgian King Leopold I in 1863 , whose honorary surgeon he became. After he was also at Napoleon III in early 1873 . had performed a lithotripsy, the French ex-emperor died shortly afterwards. For reasons of hygiene , Thompson was one of the champions of the cremation of the dead. He was also an expert in the field of nutrition, an amateur astronomer, an accomplished painter, a collector of valuable Chinese chinaware, and an author. The evening parties he gave were famous.

Life

Lineage and Early Life

Sir Henry Thompson was the only son of the general merchant Henry Thompson and his wife Susannah, a daughter of the painter Samuel Medley . He was raised in Wrentham by Mr. Fison, a nonconformist clergyman . His parents were uncompromising Baptists and wanted their son to get into the trade. When Thompson came to London, however, he was able to complete his medical training as he wished. From January 1844 he took lessons from the general practitioner George Bottomley in Croydon and studied medicine at University College London from October . There he received the gold medal in anatomy in the pre-diploma examination and in 1851 the gold medal in surgery in the final examination to obtain the medical bachelor's degree. His teachers included Robert Liston , James Syme and John Eric Erichsen , as his assistant surgeon he worked from June 1850 at London University College Hospital . Joseph Lister , for his part, was one of Thompson's first assistant surgeons, and on his advice Lister went to Edinburgh to work under James Syme. In January 1851, Thompson became a partner with his former teacher Bottomley in Croydon, but after a few months he returned to London and moved to No. 35 on Wimpole Street, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Marriage and offspring

On December 16, 1851, Thompson married the pianist Kate Loder (1825-1904), who soon became paralyzed, but was always a devoted assistant to him. The couple had a son, Henry Francis Herbert Thompson (1859–1944), who became a lawyer and Egyptologist, and two daughters, of whom the elder, author of the Handbook to the public picture galleries of Europe (1877), the Archdeacon of Durham, Henry William Watkins , and the younger the Reverend H. de Candole.

Medical career

In 1850 Thompson became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and in 1853 its Fellow . In 1852 he received the Jackson Prize of this college for his work On the pathology and treatment of stricture of the urethra . He won this award a second time in 1860 for his treatise On the healthy and morbid conditions of the prostate gland . For a short time he worked as a surgeon at St. Marylebone Hospital, but then became Assistant Surgeon at University College Hospital in 1853 , Full Surgeon in 1863 , Professor of Clinical Surgery in 1866, and Consulting Surgeon in 1874 and Professor Emeritus of Clinical Surgery.

Thompson specialized early on in the field of urology and went to Paris in July 1858 to study this discipline in depth with Jean Civiale . The latter succeeded for the first time in the first quarter of the 19th century in removing a urinary stone by breaking it into the bladder . As a student of Civiales, Thompson initially smashed the bladder stones during repeated interventions into smaller and smaller chunks, which the body excreted naturally. When Henry Jacob Bigelow recommended crushing the stones in a single operation and removing them surgically, Thompson succeeded in improving the surgical method.

Soon, Thompson gained an excellent reputation for his skillful treatment of bladder diseases, particularly promoting lithotripsy and lithotomy . In 1863 he was appointed honorary surgeon to King Leopold I of Belgium, whom he had successfully lithotripized in Brussels , and in 1866 in the same capacity under his successor Leopold II . In July and December 1872 he treated the French ex-emperor Napoleon III. in Camden House, a country estate in Chislehurst near London. On January 2 and 7, 1873, he led Napoleon III. Lithotripsy operations under anesthesia using chloroform . A third procedure was due to be performed at noon on January 9th, but the ex-emperor died of a sudden collapse an hour earlier. Thompson was charged with the death of Napoleon III. to have been in debt, but it was not difficult for him to justify himself; for the ex-emperor had succumbed to uremia .

Thompson was one of the first in England to draw attention to the subject of cremation through an article in the Contemporary Review in 1874 . Experiments in this regard had been carried out shortly before in Italy, but the first European cremation society was founded largely on Thompson's suggestion in London in 1874. He became its first president and tried to help spread the cremation in England and on the European continent. A crematorium was built in Woking in 1879 . The British Home Secretary banned its operation, which could not begin until March 1885, after the government launched a test case against a man who had his child's body cremated in Wales and ruled Sir James Stephen that the practice was not illegal was when it did not cause interference. Thompson was also instrumental in founding the company to build the crematorium in Golder's Green, near London , in 1902 , and the rules for running that company became a model for cremation societies around the world. Incidentally, the introduction of cremation drew Thompson's attention to the unsatisfactory legal situation regarding the issuing of death certificates. The Cremation Act of 1902 was intended to remedy some of the legal deficiencies that Thompson pointed out.

Other interests

In his spare time, Thompson was often engaged in astronomy . For a long time he worked in his own observatory , which he built on his country estate in Molesey . Above all, however, he served science by donating some valuable instruments to the Royal Greenwich Observatory , including a photo-heliograph with a 23 cm aperture , a 76 cm reflector telescope and a large lens telescope with an objective 65 cm in diameter and 6.9 m focal length . The latter instrument was offered for sale in March 1894. It was manufactured by Sir Howard Grubb of Dublin, and construction lasted until 1897. The instrument was twice the size of all the other telescopes the Greenwich Observatory had previously owned and in particular it improved the possibilities of photographic recordings considerably. The fact that Thompson, who was knighted in 1867, was bestowed the title of baronet on February 20, 1899 , was probably related to his gift of this telescope to the national observatory.

Thompson undoubtedly inherited his artistic talent from his maternal grandfather, Samuel Medley. He trained it further through studies with Edward Elmore and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and became an accomplished sketch artist and amateur painter. Some of his paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1865, 1870, from 1872 to 1878 annually, and in 1881, 1883 and 1885. Two of these pictures could later be admired in the Paris Salon , and Thompson also made a depiction of a landscape for this exhibition in 1891. He was also an important collector of Chinese porcelain. A catalog of the collection illustrated by him together with James McNeill Whistler was published in 1878. This became so large that it could no longer be found in Thompson's house and was largely sold at Christie's on June 1, 1880 .

In addition to articles in numerous magazines, Thompson wrote two novels under the pseudonym Pen Oliver . Charley Kingston's aunt (1885; 3rd edition 1904) is about the life of a student about 50 years before the novel was published. All But: a Chronicle of Laxenfrod Life (1886). Is illustrated with 20 full-page drawings by the author; one of them shows a self-portrait by Thompson from 1885.

As a host, Thompson was known for his octaves , that is, eight-course dinners for eight from select society at eight in the evening. Thompson held these dinners from 1872 until shortly before his death, when he invited to his 301st evening party. For around 25 years, famous artists, writers, scientists, politicians, diplomats and people from the fashion industry came together at his blackboard in Wimpole Street. The Prince of Wales and future King George V visited Thompson's 300th Octave .

death

Thompson died on April 18, 1904, at the age of 83 at his home on Wimpole Street. His body was cremated in the crematorium in Golder's Green.

Publications

  • The pathology and treatment of stricture of the urethra both in the male and female , 1852; 4th edition, London and Philadelphia 1885; German Munich 1888
  • The enlarged prostate, its pathology and treatment, with observations on the relation of this complaint to stone in the bladder , 1858; 6th ed. London and Philadelphia 1886; Awarded the Jackson Prize in 1866; the later editions under the title The diseases of the prostate: their pathology and treatment ; German Erlangen 1867
  • Practical lithotomy and lithotrity , London 1863; 3rd edition 1880; German based on the 3rd edition by H. Goldschmidt, Kassel and Berlin 1882
  • Clinical lectures on diseases of the urinary organs , London 1868; 8th edition 1888; German by Casper, Munich 1889; French translations, 1874 and 1889
  • The preventive treatment of calculous disease and the use of solvent remedies , 1873; 3rd edition 1888
  • Cremation , 1874; 4th edition 1901
  • Food and feeding. London 1880; 12th, increased edition 1910.
  • On tumors of the bladder; their nature, symptoms, and surgical treatment. Preceded by a consideration of the best methods of diagnosing all forms of vesical disease, including digital exploration and its results , London 1884; German by R. Wittelshöfer, Vienna 1885; French by Jamain, Paris 1885
  • Lectures on some important points connected with the surgery of the urinary organs , London 1884; German by E. Dupuis, Wiesbaden 1885
  • Diet in relation to age and activity , 1886; 4th edition 1903; improved edition 1910
  • On the suprapubic operation for opening the bladder for the stone and for tumors , London 1886
  • Modern cremation, its history and practice , London 1889; 4th edition 1901; German, Berlin 1889
  • Introduction to the catalog of calculi of the bladder (upwards of 1000) removed by operation by Sir Henry Thompson and now in the Hunterian Museum , 1893
  • The unknown God , 1902

literature

Remarks

  1. ^ A b D'Arcy Power: Thompson, Sir Henry , in: Dictionary of National Biography , Supplemente von 1912, Vol. 3, p. 503.
  2. ↑ a b c Thompson, Sir Henry , in: Encyclopædia Britannica , 11th edition, 1910-11, Vol. 26, pp. 869 f.
  3. ^ D'Arcy Power: Thompson, Sir Henry , in: Dictionary of National Biography , Supplemente von 1912, Vol. 3, pp. 503 f.
  4. ^ Thompson, Sir Henry , in Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon , 6th Edition, 1902-08, Vol. 19, p. 497.
  5. ↑ a b Thompson, Sir Henry , in: Julius Pagel (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon of Outstanding Doctors of the Nineteenth Century , Vienna and Berlin 1901, Sp. 1708.
  6. ↑ a b c d D'Arcy Power: Thompson, Sir Henry , in: Dictionary of National Biography , Supplemente von 1912, Vol. 3, p. 504.
  7. ^ D'Arcy Power: Thompson, Sir Henry , in: Dictionary of National Biography , Supplemente von 1912, Vol. 3, pp. 504 f.
personal data
SURNAME Thompson, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British surgeon
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1820
PLACE OF BIRTH Framlingham ( Suffolk )
DATE OF DEATH April 18, 1904
Place of death London