Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Ridley, Humphrey

664852Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 48 — Ridley, Humphrey1896Norman Moore

RIDLEY, HUMPHREY, M.D. (1653–1708), physician, son of Thomas Ridley of Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was born in 1653. He matriculated from Merton College, Oxford, on 14 July 1671, but did not take a degree at Oxford, though he there studied medicine; in September 1679 he graduated M.D. at Leyden, maintaining a thesis ‘De Lue Venerea.’ He was incorporated M.D. at Cambridge in 1688. He settled in London, became a candidate or member of the College of Physicians on 30 Sept. 1691, and was elected a fellow on 30 Sept. 1692. He gave the Gulstonian lectures in 1694. He published in 1695 ‘The Anatomy of the Brain,’ dedicated to the president and fellows of the College of Physicians. The book was formally approved by the censors' board on 7 Sept. 1694, and, although following so soon after the important writings of Thomas Willis and Raymond Vieussens, contains additions to their accounts of the brain. He dissected the venous supply of the corpora striata more exactly than Willis, and demonstrated from observation in the engorged brains of men who had been hanged, the lymph vessels of which only one had been mentioned by Anthony Nuck in 1692. He was also the first to describe and name the circular sinus. His is the first English description of a sarcoma or new growth of the pineal gland (Anatomy, p. 83). He attacks the use of imagination in scientific writings, and gives anatomical reasons for doubting whether the soul is more seated in the brain than in the body at large. The figures which illustrate the book were drawn by William Cowper (1666–1709) [q. v.] the surgeon. A Latin translation was published at Leyden in 1725 by Langerak. On its title-page Ridley is erroneously named Henry, a mistake due to the fact that in his own book his initial only appears. In 1703 Tonson published for him a volume, entitled ‘Observationes quædam Medico-practicæ et Physiologicæ,’ which shows him to have been as good a clinical observer as he was an anatomist. The observations, some of which are accompanied by accounts of autopsies, are more than thirty in number. The most interesting is that on hydrophobia in an English groom who accompanied his master to Ryswick in October 1697, when the peace was being concluded, and was there bitten by a Danish dog. Symptoms of hydrophobia developed on 11 Dec., and it was observed that in the convulsions his head was generally turned towards the wound, while just before his death difficulty of swallowing ceased and he took a large quantity of toast soaked in beer. Ridley died in April 1708, and was buried in St. Andrew's Church, Holborn.

[Munk's Coll. of Phys. i. 490; Garth's Dispensary, canto v.; Foster's Alumni Oxon.; Works.]

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