Obituary notices of fellows deceased

Abstract

Dr. Benjamin Guy Babington was born in 1794. He was the son of Dr. William Babington, who, in his time, held a foremost place as a popular and successful London physician. Educated at the Charter House, he subsequently went through the usual course of study at Haileybury College then required of young men destined for the Indian Civil Service; he went out to the Madras Presidency as a member of that service in 1812. After remaining seven years in India, he was compelled by ill health to return home, and then determined to leave the Indian Service and adopt his father’s profession. With this view he entered at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and took the degree of M. B. in 1825, and that of M. D. in 1830, In the meantime he commenced practice in London, and in 1831 was elected a Fellow of the College of Physicians. For the prosecution of his medical studies in London he had chosen Guy’s Hospital, where Ins father was physician, and he was himself appointed assistant physician to that Institution in 1837, and promoted to be one of the physicians in 1840. Dr. Babington was much esteemed as a clinical teacher, and was the author of papers on different professional subjects, published in the Guy’s Hospital Reports, and elsewhere; but he also engaged in researches of more general scientific interest, and among them his observations on the blood, published in the ‘Medico-Chirurgical Transactions' of 1830, deserve especial mention, inasmuch as he there showed that the liquid part of the circulating blood, or “liquor sanguinis” (a name proposed by him to distinguish it from the serum, and very generally adopted since) really contains or yields the coagulable matter, or fibrin, which solidifies in the process of coagulation. This, no doubt, was merely a confirmation by simple but well-devised experiments of the doctrine held by Hewson and his contemporaries, and accepted by most British physiologists; but the confirmation was needful and well timed on account of the erroneous views then prevailing on the continent on the authority of Prevost and Dumas. At a later time, namely in 1859, Dr. Babington communicated to the Royal Society a series of observations on the effect of various salts dissolved m water in retarding or otherwise altering the rate of spontaneous evaporation, and an abstract stating the nature and results of the experiments was published in the ‘Proceedings’ for 1859.