DEATH OF DR. FRANCIS EDMUND ANSTIE.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 156, 3 December 1874, Page 3

DEATH OF DR. FRANCIS EDMUND ANSTIE.

[From the Spectator .]

The ranks of the medical profession have lost one of their noblest soldiers in Dr Francis Edmund Anstie, who died from the results of a puncture in the hand with a needle, while performing a post-mortem examination on one of the children of the schools of the Patriotic Fund at Wandsworth. The child had died from an epidemic form of peritonitis due to some serious sanitary mischief in the school, believed to be a supply of bad water to one of the rooms. The puncture led to corruption of the blood, and to death within the week from the time it occurred. Dr Anstie had published a great work on neuralgia ; he was also one of the most zealous and able of sanitary reformers, as well as a first-rate physician and accomplished man. But his special characteristic was the fervour of his temperament. Not many months ago, he attacked us very sharply in his monthly periodical, The Fractionary for our denunciation of the atrocities of painful vivisection, and we inserted from him a vehement letter in rejoinder to our reply. But whether he was in the right or in the wrong, it was impossible to mistake the ardour of the man, or to doubt the complete and very unusual disinterestedness with which he threw himself into all bis work. He was indeed a good member of the Church militant, whatever his creed, for he loved to fight and even suffer in a good cause. Yet there was nothing narrow about him ; his zeal did not arise, as zeal so often does, from exceptional limitations of temperament or knowledge. On the contrary, in spite of his wide attainments, the “fire was not quenched.” Not only medical science, but both medical and human morality, have lost a strenuous champion in Dr Anstie.