Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1835

CHARLES WEST (1816-1898) An inquiry into the pathological importance of ulceration of the os uteri. Blanchard and Lea 1854 [4] [vii]-viii [17]-88, 32 pp. 22.8 cm.

West, the noteworthy Victorian obstetrician and pediatrician, was unable to study medicine at Oxford because of his Baptist background. He studied instead at London's St. Bartholomew's Hospital and went abroad to study at Bonn, Paris, and Berlin, where he obtained his medical degree in 1837. West served as physician to the Infirmary for Children at London, lectured in midwifery at the Middlesex Hospital and later at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1852 West founded the Hospital for Sick Children in London, the first institution of its kind in England. He served as senior physician for twenty-three years, consulting physician for two years, and resigned in 1877 after a series of difficulties which were partly connected with his conversion to Catholicism. He was a prominent member of the Royal College of Physicians and was Senior Censor, Harveian Orator, Croonian and Lumleian Lecturer. In 1847 he gave the first full course of lectures on children's diseases at Middlesex Hospital and published them as Lectures on diseases of infancy and childhood the following year. This work, expanded in 1854, went through seven editions and numerous translations. West was selected to deliver the prestigious Croonian Lectures in 1854. Here, in a series of three lectures, he discusses various diseases of the uterus with special emphasis on ulcerations of its surface.