set out on continental travel, and spent the greater part of a year in a tour through Germany, Italy, and France. In the year 1820, however, he finally settled down in London, in Bloomsbury Square; and being in the same year elected assistant-physician to Guy's Hospital, he commenced that course of arduous clinical study and indefatigable industry as a teacher which made his own reputation, and contributed much to raise that of the school in which he worked. In 1824 he was made full physician, and occupied this post till 1843, when, on resigning, he was made consulting physician.
Bright's energy and industry in his hospital work were very remarkable. For some years he is said to have spent six hours a day in the wards or post-mortem room, and he was an active lecturer in the medical school. In 1822 he gave a course on botany in relation to materia medica, which was continued for three years. In 1823 he began to give clinical lectures; in 1824 he took part in the medical lectures with Dr. Cholmley, and afterwards for many years shared the course with Dr. Addison. The outcome of their joint labours was the commencement of a text-book, 'Elements of the Practice of Medicine,' of which, however, only one volume appeared in 1839, and this was understood to be chiefly the composition of Addison.
In 1827 he published the first volume of a collection of 'Reports of Medical Cases,' intended to show the importance of morbid anatomy in the study of disease. In this he gave the first account of those researches on dropsy with which his name is inseparably connected, though his first observation on the subject was made, he says, in 1813. While the symptom dropsy, or watery swelling, had been known from the earliest period of medicine, it had been, shortly before Bright's time, shown by Blackall and Wells that it was in many cases connected with a special symptom, namely, that the urine was coagulable by heat, from the presence in it of albumen. But these two symptoms were not traced to their source, or connected with a diseased condition of any organ. Bright, by his investigations of the state of the body after death, ascertained that in all such cases a peculiar condition of the kidneys was present, and thus proved that the symptoms spoken of were really those of a disease of the kidneys. The explanation once given seems as simple as 'putting two and two together;' but the importance of the discovery is shown by the fact that no one before had suspected the kidney to be the organ implicated. It proved Bright not only to be an acute observer, but to possess the much rarer Bright faculty of synthesis, which makes an observer a discoverer. The truth and importance of his researches were soon generally recognised. In a short time Morbus Brightii, or Bright's Disease, was a familiar appellation over the whole of Europe, and will doubtless preserve the memory of Bright so long as the disease is known by a separate name. Next to Laennec's discoveries in chest diseases, this of Bright's is perhaps the most important special discovery made in medicine in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The volume of medical reports contained, besides those on dropsy, other observations, which would alone have made the book a very valuable one. It was followed in 1831 by a second volume, in two parts, containing reports on diseases of the brain and nervous system, full of observation of the highest value. Both volumes are illustrated with admirable plates, and taken together form one of the most important contributions to morbid anatomy ever made in this country by one person.
In 1836 appeared the first volume of the well-known 'Guy's Hospital Reports,' to which Bright was from the first a copious contributor. The first and second papers in the first volume, on the 'Treatment of Fever' and on 'Diseased Arteries of the Brain' respectively, are by him, as are also six other papers in the same volume, of which the most important are 'Cases and Observations illustrative of Renal Disease,' and 'A Tabular View of the Morbid Appearances in One Hundred Cases of Albuminous Urine.' The two last mentioned extend and support his great discovery by several additional developments, which subsequent research has done nothing but confirm. In the second volume are two papers by Bright one on 'Abdominal Tumours,' which was the first of an important series continued by two papers in the third volume of the 'Reports,' one in the fourth, and one in the fifth. This same fifth volume also contains an important paper entitled 'Observations on Renal Diseases: Memoir the Second.' In the first volume of the second series (1843) appears an account of observations made under the superintendence of Bright by Dr. Barlow and Dr. Owen Rees on patients with albuminous urine; but after this Bright's name does not appear in the reports.
Bright's professional success, apart from his hospital work, was steady, if not rapid. On 25 June 1832 he was promoted from being a licentiate to the fellowship of the College of Physicians, at that time a rare distinction. He was Gulstonian lecturer in 1833, and took as his subject 'The functions of the
