Robert James Graves
Robert James Graves | |
---|---|
President of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland | |
In office 1843–1849 | |
Preceded by | Sir Henry Marsh, 1st Baronet |
Succeeded by | William Stokes |
Personal details | |
Born | Holles Street, Anglo-Irish | 27 March 1796
Alma mater | Trinity College Dublin |
Robert James Graves
Early life
The eighth child of the Dean of Ardagh,
After a brilliant undergraduate career in the arts, he received a degree in medicine in 1818 and left for London to study surgery under Sir William Blizard. Afterwards, he spent the following three years travelling the continent between stints as an observer at the medical schools of Edinburgh, Berlin, Vienna, Göttingen, Hamburg, Copenhagen and those of France and Italy.[2]
Graves had an exceptional talent for languages, and while in continental Europe he was imprisoned for ten days in
Medical career
Graves returned to Dublin in 1821, setting up his own medical practice and introducing new clinical methods that he had witnessed on his travels to the Meath Hospital and the Park Street School of Medicine which he helped found. This included, among other things, bedsides teaching, of which William Hale-White said "this is real clinical teaching", and went on in his book, Great Doctors of the Nineteenth Century, to say that Graves held the honour of introducing this system to Ireland:
(Graves) insists that... mere walking the hospital must go. The Edinburgh system, in which the teacher interrogates the patient in a loud voice, the clerk repeats the patients' answer in a similar voice, the crowd of students round the bed, most of whom cannot see the patient, hears all this and makes notes, is of no use. Students must examine patients for themselves under the guidance of their teachers, they must make suggestions as to diagnosis, morbid anatomy and treatment to their teacher who will discuss the cases with them.
In this technique one of his students, William Stokes (1804–1878), soon became his collaborator. Together they made the Dublin School of Medicine famous throughout the world.
Graves was possessed of the qualities that would ensure a great teacher. He was tall, somewhat swarthy with a vivacious manner, and like other avant-garde professors of his time, he gave his lectures in English rather than in Latin, or Dog Latin as was still the case in most classes in the 1830s. In his introductory lecture he said: "From the very commencement the student should set out to witness the progress and effects of sickness and ought to persevere in the daily observation of disease during the whole period of his studies".
He was appointed Professor to the Institutes of medicine in the Irish College of Physicians and wrote essays and gave lectures on physiological topics. His "Clinical Lectures" were published in 1843 (and again in 1848), giving fame to his name throughout Europe. He was president of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in 1843 and 1844 and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1849. He received honorary membership of the medical societies in Berlin, Vienna, Hamburg, Tübingen, Bruges and Montreal.
Among the innovations introduced in the lectures were the timing of the pulse by watch and the practicing of giving food and liquids to patients with fever instead of withholding nourishment. It was on a ward round that Graves light-heartedly suggested to William Stokes, 'Lest when I am gone you may be at a loss for an epitaph for me, let me give you one – He Fed Fevers.'
As well as the practical importance of bedside learning to ensure that a graduate was not "a practitioner who has never practised" he emphasised the importance of research, "learn the duty as well as taste the pleasure of original work". He corresponded with old pupils all over the world and continued as an inspired teacher until his death in 1853.
Graves was sometimes sarcastic. In dealing with a colleague's attack on the use of the stethoscope (the instrument was advocated by himself and Stokes having been invented in France in 1816), he wrote: "We suspect Dr Clutterbuck's sense of hearing must be injured: for him the 'ear trumpet' magnifies but distorts sound, rendering it less distinct than before". Dr. Clutterbuck was Henry Clutterbuck, 1770–1856.
In recognition of his achievements in education, Graves was named Regius professor of the Institute of Medicine in Trinity College. With William Stokes he edited the Dublin Journal of Medical and Chemical Science from 1832 to 1842, a journal he had founded with Sir Robert Kane (1809–1890). His lasting fame rests chiefly on his Clinical Lectures, which were a model for the day and recommended by none other than Armand Trousseau (1801–1867), who suggested the term Graves' disease.
Family
In 1821 he married his first wife (and first cousin), Matilda Jane Eustace (1806–1825), daughter of Richard and Catherine (Drought) Eustace of Valetta,
Death
Graves kept a townhouse on
Bibliography
- Clinical reports, of the medical cases in the Meath Hospital and County of Dublin Infirmary, during the session 1826, 1827 (1827)
- A lecture on the functions of the lymphatic system (1834)
- Clinical lectures delivered during the sessions of 1834-5 and 1836-7 (1838)
- Clinical lectures (1842)
- A system of clinical medicine (1843)
- Clinical lectures on the practice of medicine (1848)
- Studies in physiology and medicine (1863), edited by William Stokes
References
- ^ Rev. James Drought Archived 12 November 2013 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b c Robert James Graves
- ^ Slaney Park
- ^ Cloghan Castle
- JSTOR 30101157.
- ^ "Internet Archive Search: Graves%2C%20robert%20james%2C%201796-1853".
Sources
- Biography of Robert James Graves [1]
- Clinical Reports of the Medical Cases in the Meath Hospital and County of Dublin Infirmary During the Session 1826, 27, P. 1.
With William Stokes. Dublin, 1827,
- Lectures on the Functions of the Lymphatic System.
Dublin, 1828.
- Clinical lectures.
First published 1835 in the London Medical and Surgical Journal and London Medical Gazette. The series for two sessions were first collected and published together in Philadelphia, 1838, as: Clinical lectures delivered during the sessions of 1834–5 and 1836–7.
- Newly observed affection of the thyroid gland in females. (Clinical lectures.)
London Medical and Surgical Journal, 1835; VII: 516–517.
- A System of Clinical Medicine.
Dublin, Fannin & Co., 1843. 3rd American edition with notes etc. by William Gerhard (1809–1872), Philadelphia, 1848. German translation by Heiman Bressler (1805–1873): Klinische Erfahrungen aus dem Englischen von Robert Graves übersetzt. Leipzig, 1843.
- Clinical Lectures on the Practice of Medicine.
2nd edition of A System of Clinical Medicine, edited by John Moore Neligan (1815–1863). 2 volumes, Dublin 1848; French translation by Sigismond Jaccoud, Paris, 1862. Much new material was added to this edition, especially Graves' observation on the epidemiology of cholera. He was one of the first to clearly show that cholera was contagious and spread along the lines of human contact.
- Graves published John Noble Johnson's :
The life of Thomas Linacre etc. London, 1835.
Obituaries
- Medical Times and Gazette, London, 1853, VI, page 351.
- William Stokes in Medical Times and Gazette, London, 1854, VIII, page 1.
- J. F. Duncan in Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, 1878, LXV: 1.