[CHAPTER XXVIII.]
PARKES, GUY, SIMON, AND PUBLIC HEALTH.
“Prevention is better than cure” is the homely proverb which marks out a large proportion of the work of sanitary science. The prevention of disease and of its spread, and the promotion of the general healthiness of the people—these are objects which modern progress has brought into view. When they are completely attained we shall all die of old age unless cut off by accidents or violence; and this is a goal which many sanitarians of the present day have vividly before their mind.
The public health and the public welfare have been sought by no man more earnestly than by Edmund Alexander Parkes. Of him Dr. Russell Reynolds said:[24] “In the combination of moral, mental, and physical beauty, Dr. Parkes was to my knowledge never equalled, to my belief cannot be surpassed. Pure as a sunbeam, strong as a man, tender as a woman, keen as any scientist to unravel the hidden mysteries of life in its minutest detail of chemical and physiological research, yet practical in the application of his knowledge to the cleansing of a drain or the lightening of a knapsack; he made the world much richer by his life, much poorer by his death.”
Parkes was born on March 29, 1819, in the village of Bloxam, Oxfordshire, his father being Mr. William Parkes, of the Marble-yard, Warwick, “a man of superior mind, remarkable alike for industry, firmness, and nobility of character.”[25] His mother, Frances Byerly, daughter of Mr. Thomas Byerly of Etruria, Staffordshire, was much occupied in literature, and her sister, wife of Professor A. T. Thomson of University College, London, was a well-known biographer and novelist.
Under such favouring influences young Parkes grew up a gentle but unusually merry and happy boy. After being educated at the Charterhouse, he entered as a medical student at University College, and spent much time in his uncle’s laboratory, becoming an excellent manipulator, and already showing a fondness for research. At the first M.B. examination at London University in 1840 he was exhibitioner and medallist in anatomy, physiology, and chemistry, and medallist in materia medica. In 1841 at the final M.B. he was medallist in physiology and comparative anatomy, and gained honours in medicine. He had taken the College of Surgeons’ diploma in 1840.
Of this period of Parkes’s life Sir William Jenner, an intimate fellow-student at University College, says:
“As a student he was distinguished by brightness and cheerfulness, amiability, unselfish willingness to help others at any cost of trouble to himself, energy in work, diligence in the using of each hour for the studies of that hour, the high moral tone that pervaded his converse, and above all, and crowning all, by the real living purity of his being.”
Early in 1842 Parkes entered the army medical service, and went as assistant-surgeon to the 84th regiment to Madras and Moulmein. Here he prosecuted inquiries which bore fruit in two small publications on the Dysentery and Hepatitis of India (1846), and on Asiatic and Algide Cholera (1847). But before this period he had retired from the army and entered upon practice in Upper Seymour Street, Portman Square, becoming further known as a physician by editing and completing Dr. Thomson’s work on Diseases of the Skin (1850). This was only a portion of his literary and original work at this time, during which he contributed largely to the Medical Times, and from 1852 to 1855 edited the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, for which difficult task he was exceedingly well fitted.
Having been appointed one of the physicians to University College Hospital, his influence was very marked, both on his students and his colleagues. One of his pupils, afterwards a distinguished physician, said that he never went round the wards with him without feeling an intense wish to become better, and at the same time feeling that he could become so. In 1855 Parkes delivered the Gulstonian Lectures at the College of Physicians, taking the subject of Pyrexia, or the State of Fever.
During the Crimean War, when great pressure existed upon the hospitals at Scutari, Dr. Parkes was selected by Government to proceed to the seat of war to establish an additional large hospital. He fixed upon Rankioi on the Dardanelles, and his choice proved excellent. He worked most zealously to make everything as perfect as possible, and he accomplished much in spite of the red-tape which was so disastrously prominent in the war administration of that time. He did not in any way spare himself, though his constitution had shown serious signs of weakness in London, when he had had severe attacks of pneumonia and phlebitis. His report on the work of his hospital at the conclusion of the war was a most valuable one, and he gained the high esteem of Mr. Sidney Herbert, afterwards Lord Herbert of Lea.