Eighth Child Research Articles

Mr. H. Brearley

MR. HARRY BREARLEY, the inventor of stainless steel, died on July 14 at the age of seventy-seven. A native of Sheffield, and the eighth child of a family brought up in “Ramsden‘s Yard”, of which he has given a vivid account in a delightful autobiography, “Knotted String”, he had only an elementary school education and then worked as a cellar lad in a crucible steel works. He was fortunate in being taken from this to be a laboratory boy under a capable and kindly analyst, who persuaded him to attend evening classes. He married young, and quite early collaborated with Fred Ibbotson in a book on the analysis of steelworks materials. In 1914 he went to Riga, then a Russian town, as chemist in a steel works associated with Messrs. Firth of Sheffield, where he improved the technique of hardening armour-piercing shells, having also to act as managing director when the Russian Revolution came and many members of the staff left. On returning to Sheffield he took charge of the Brown–Firth Laboratory, installed jointly by two neighbouring firms. Difficulties in the making of armour plates led him to the further study of the thermal treatment of alloy steels.

BRONCHIAL ASTHMA IN PREGNANCY

To the Editor:— I read the paper entitled Bronchial Asthma as a Complication of Pregnancy by Dr. Bradford Green (The Journal, February, 3, p. 360) and also the communication in Correspondence (April 14, p. 1248) from Dr. R. H. Kampmeier, and would like to comment on Dr. Kampmeier's letter. His contention that allergic manifestations disappear during pregnancy, in contradiction to Dr. Green's experience that there is aggravation of asthma during pregnancy, is also borne out by my experience of an interesting case. A woman, aged 28, had had severe attacks of bronchial asthma for the past eight years. During pregnancy she was free of all symptoms of asthma and this absence of symptoms continued till three weeks post partum. When she was 30, I delivered her of her eighth child. All lived. The pregnancies occurred about one year apart to relieve her of her asthma. All the customary skin testing

XIII. The case of a woman, from whom the bones of a fœtus were extracted

On the 25 of April 1749, the wife of one Benjamin Last, a cooper, in the parish of Debenham, in the county of Suffolk, aged about 34 years, being pregnant of her eighth child, had all the symptoms of a woman in labour.