Sir Thomas Barlow, Bt., K.C.V.O., F.R.S

M., E. C.

doi:10.1038/155197a0

Obituary
Published: 17 February 1945

Sir Thomas Barlow, Bt., K.C.V.O., F.R.S

E. C. M.

Nature volume 155, page 197 (1945)Cite this article

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Abstract

THOMAS BARLOW, who died in London on January 12, was within eight months of his hundredth birthday, which he would have well liked to see. Brought up in the cotton belt of Lancashire, in a household where character—rough hewn but solid—was the ruling factor, he was endowed with a good memory and a power of observation that has made famous naturalists; and his span covered a century in which medicine has progressed geometrically. If the wattage of life may be taken as a multiple of duration, brilliance and worth, no wonder Barlow has left a mark on his contemporaries. His middle period as popular consultant and physician to three reigning sovereigns—Robert Bridges said he knew no medical man with a more intimate personal sympathy with his patients—was preceded by a period in which he traced a common childish disorder to its origin as a deficiency disease, and was succeeded by an Indian summer in which he used his experience and still abounding energy to guide a benevolent fund which gave a sense of security to the declining days of less successful practitioners.