One result of the Royal Commission of Investigation into the administration of the war was the foundation of the Army Medical School, and Mr. Herbert never showed better judgment than in selecting Dr. Parkes to be Professor of Military Hygiene in connection with it. Consequently he gave up in 1860 his post at University College; he was appointed Emeritus Professor, and a marble bust of him was placed in the College museum.
Parkes found that in order adequately to teach the subjects involved in preserving and promoting the health of the army, he must not only study the special features of army life and the peculiar liabilities attaching thereto, but also the general science of hygiene, then almost new. He organised at the cost of immense labour a detailed system of instruction, based on the principle of making the student apply practically what he taught. All the special questions which came up relating to air, water, food, temperature, clothing, house construction, drainage, &c., were as far as possible illustrated in the laboratory, and individual instruction was most carefully given.
In 1864 was published the first edition of Parkes’s “Manual of Practical Hygiene,” a masterly book, accurate, learned, clear, full, and of the highest interest to the thoughtful mind. The introduction to this work opens with a clear definition of the subject. “Hygiene is the art of preserving health; that is, of obtaining the most perfect action of body and mind during as long a period as is consistent with the laws of life. In other words, it aims at rendering growth more perfect, decay less rapid, life more vigorous, death more remote.”
Later he says: “It is undoubtedly true that we can, even now, literally choose between health and disease; not, perhaps, always individually, for the sins of our fathers may be visited upon us, or the customs of our life and the chains of our civilisation and social customs may gall us, or even our fellow-men may deny us health, or the knowledge which leads to health. But, as a race, man holds his own destiny, and can choose between good and evil; and as time unrolls the scheme of the world, it is not too much to hope that the choice will be for good.” He further powerfully indicates the basis of state medicine, to secure for all individuals the conditions of health which they often cannot secure for themselves. He shows too that self-interest, state-benefit, and pecuniary profit are at one in these matters when rightly understood. “It is but too commonly forgotten,” he says, “that the whole nation is interested in the proper treatment of every one of its members, and in its own interest has a right to see that the relations between individuals are not such as in any way to injure the well-being of the community at large.” It is almost needless to add that numerous editions of Parkes’s Practical Hygiene have been called for; it has also been translated into several foreign languages.
We have enumerated, however, but a small portion of the subjects upon which Parkes’s unceasing philanthropic activity was exercised. For many years he wrote an annual review of the Progress of Hygiene, contributed to the Army Medical Reports. He served on many public inquiries relating to matters of health, and did more for the diminution of mortality in the army than any other man. He carried on many protracted and difficult physiological investigations, such as those on the effects of diet and exercise, on the elimination of nitrogen, on the effects of alcohol on the human body, on the effects of coffee, extract of meat, and alcohol on men marching, chiefly contributed to the Royal Society. As a member of the Senate of London University, and of the General Medical Council, and as Secretary to the Senate of the Army Medical School, he performed detailed work of the highest value, and all in spite of delicate health.
“With increase of years,” says Sir William Jenner,[26] “his mind ripened, his sphere of action widened, his influence over others operated in new and perhaps more important ways; but in all moral and intellectual essentials Dr. Parkes was as a man what he was as a youth—he was animated by the same principles and stimulated by the same faith. As years went on his mind proved itself to be singularly well balanced; he possessed an extraordinary power of acquiring information; his memory was very retentive; he was the best-informed man in the medical literature of the century I ever met; he was unprejudiced as he was learned; he could use with ease the information he acquired, and could express his ideas clearly and simply; his language was always elegant, and on occasions eloquent. His powers of observation, of perception, of reasoning, and of judgment were all good, and equally good. But as in his youth, so in his manhood, the beauty of his moral nature, his unselfish loving-kindness, his power of inoculating others with his own love of truth, with his own sense of the necessity of searching for the truth, of questioning nature till she yield up the truth, of earnest work, were his most striking characteristics.”
At last the seeds of weakness which were constitutional in Parkes developed into acute tuberculosis, and he died on March 15, 1875, after an illness of four months. His domestic life had been a very happy one, but his wife, a Miss Chattock, whom he married in 1851, had died in 1873, and he was much broken by her loss. He left no children. His monument is in the Parkes Museum of Hygiene, which enforces eloquently the lessons of his life.
Dr. William Augustus Guy, F.R.S., is one of the most eminent of modern promoters of the public health. He was born at Chichester in the year 1810, his ancestors for three generations having been medical practitioners there. His grandfather, William Guy, was a pupil of John Hunter, and in Hayley’s life of Romney it is stated that “Cowper said of him that he won his heart at first sight, and Romney (who painted his portrait) declared that he had never examined any manly features which he would sooner choose for a model if he had occasion to represent the compassionate benignity of the Saviour.”[27]
After a childhood spent with this estimable grandfather, young Guy was educated at Christ’s Hospital, and later studied for five years at Guy’s Hospital. Winning the Fothergillian medal of the Medical Society of London for the best essay on Asthma, in 1831, at the early age of twenty-one, he was encouraged to enter at Cambridge, where, after a further period of two years spent at Heidelberg and Paris, he took his M.B. degree in 1837.