ELLIOTSON, Dr John, was born at. Southwark, London, towards the end of the last century. He studied medicine first at Edinburgh and then at Cambridge, in both which places he took the degree of M.D., and subsequently at the Borough Hospitals in London. In 1817 he obtained the post of assistant physician, and six years later that of physician at St Thomas’s Hospital. He there introduced clinical lecturing, a practice which, except at the London Hospital, was at the time nowhere in vogue in the metropolis. In 1831 he ceased lecturing at St Thomas’s, and was elected professor of the principles and practice of physic in London University; in 1834 he resigned the physicianship of the former institution, and accepted a similar post at the North London Hospital. In 1837 he espoused the cause of mesmerism, and thus eventually brought himself into collision with the medical committee of the hospital, a circumstance which led him, on December 28, 1838, to resign the offices held by him there and at the university. In spite of the discouragements he had received, he continued the practice of mesmerism, and became in 1849 physician of a mesmeric infirmary. He died July 29, 1868. Dr Elliotson was the discoverer of the communicability of glanders to the human subject, the treatment of neuralgia by acupuncture, and the fact that pain does not necessarily continue till death in cases of perforation or rupture of the stomach; he was the first to prove the value of quinine as an antiperiodic, of strong solution of silver nitrate in erysipelas, of prussic acid in gastrodynia and vomiting (Lancet, 1827, xi. p. 671), and as a means of preparing the stomach for other medicines, of cupric sulphate in chronic diarrhoea, and of creasote, potassium iodide, and ferrous carbonate in other ...