Memorial to Sir Walter Morley Fletcher

Abstract

THE public life of Great Britain suffered a loss of more than common magnitude through the death of Sir Walter Morley Fletcher, first secretary of the Medical Research Council, on June 7, 1933. He was then in his sixtieth year and in the height of those powers which he had used without stint in the advancement of knowledge for the relief of human suffering. Walter Fletcher gave richly to the common weal, and it is fitting that some worthy tribute of an enduring kind should be paid to his memory. An appeal has therefore been issued over the signatures of the Lord President of the Council, the president of the Royal Society and representatives of aspects of science and medicine with which Sir Walter Fletcher was particularly associated. It is considered that the tribute should consist in the first place of a personal memorial, and secondly of the inception of some scheme for the furtherance of the cause which Sir Walter Fletcher had so much at heart. It is therefore proposed first to commission a portrait bust, to be placed in a suitable setting in the entrance hall of the National Institute for Medical Research, at Hampstead. The remainder of the sum collected will then be used as a fund for building—at the farm premises of the National Institute at Mill Hill—a Walter Fletcher Laboratory, to be devoted particularly to those nutritional studies in which he was so keenly interested. This will not only provide an appropriate memorial, but also it will make an urgently needed contribution to the national equipment for work in what is at present among the most important of all branches of medical research. All subscriptions should be sent to the Secretary, Fletcher Memorial Fund, 38 Old Queen Street, Westminster, S.W.I.