in starving animals, furnished the proof experimentally and qualitatively; and Quain's claim was freely admitted by Virchow and Paget." Previous to this he had published, early in his career at University College Hospital (1845), contributions on Bright's Disease of the Kidneys, and on Injuries to the Valves of the Heart. His Lumleian lecture before the Royal College of Surgeons in 1872 dealt with Diseases of the Muscular Walls of the Heart.
The Dictionary of Medicine, on which Dr. Quain's leisure time had been spent for several years since 1875, appeared in 1882, and met a real want, for Copeland's Dictionary had gone out of date, and Reynolds's System was not intended to be an encyclopedic book of reference. The Dictionary first appeared as a volume of nineteen hundred pages, and was the joint work of a very large number of prominent medical writers, among whom Dr. Quain himself and his editorial coadjutors. Dr. Frederick Roberts and Dr. Mitchell Bruce, contributed largely. The work, according to the Lancet, "admirably filled the want long felt by the medical profession of a thoroughly convenient and at the same time exhaustive book of reference. It had the additional advantage of being thoroughly brought up to the knowledge of the day, for, as its editor remarked in the preface, although it occupied some years in production, each part of it was so arranged as to permit of alteration and addition up to the very time of going to press. The editor's own articles chiefly dealt with affections of the heart." The Lancet points out that Sir Richard Quain's faculty for the arrangement of facts in such an order as to convey them to the mind of the reader in a succession which makes the whole train of reasoning symmetrical is particularly noticeable in the essay on Fatty Degeneration of the Heart, already mentioned, and is also traceable to but little less an extent in the articles on Angina Pectoris, Aneurism of the Heart, and Diseases of the Bronchial Tubes, and in the general remarks on Disease.
In 1885 Dr. Quain delivered the Harveian Oration at the Royal College of Physicians, taking for his subject The Healing Art in its Historic and Prophetic Aspects, and beginning his address with citations of the adverse remarks that had been made as to the progress of medicine by Hoffmann, Gregory, Sir William Hamilton, and others. In refutation of these statements he mentioned many curious and amusing instances of extraordinary superstitions concerning medicine and surgery from which mankind had freed itself. As a speaker he was not eloquent, and it is admitted that there was even a lack of breadth and dignity in his presentation of a subject; yet the Lancet commends the addresses he made at the meetings of the Medical Council as showing his familiarity with the details and the clearness of his memory on all subjects, and as presenting prac-
