Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/146

 medicine licence being dated Liverpool, 8 July 1847. In 1846 he married. In 1859 he removed his business, still quite small, to the then new township of St. Helens, half-way between Wigan and Liverpool. At St. Helens he picked up, from the chance remark of a lady who purchased his pills, the phrase ‘worth a guinea a box,’ which he made the advertising motto of his concern. In 1866 his elder son, Joseph, joined the business, and infused into it a highly enterprising spirit. In 1885 the present head-factory and office-buildings in Westfield Street, St. Helens, were built at an initial cost of 30,000l. Joseph Beecham then visited the United States, and established a factory in New York, since followed by factories and agencies in several other countries. In 1887 the father bought an estate, Mursley Hall, near Winslow, Buckinghamshire, where he farmed till 1893. In 1895 he retired from active work in favour of his son Joseph. After an extended tour in the United States he built a house, Wychwood, Northwood Avenue, Southport, Lancashire, where he died on 6 April 1907, leaving a large personal fortune, and his share in an immense business. In South Lancashire he was well known as an eccentric public benefactor. By religion he was a congregationalist. Besides his son Joseph (b. 1848), mayor of St. Helens in 1889–99 and 1910–12, who was knighted in 1912, he had a second son, William Eardley Beecham (b. 1855), a doctor practising in London.

 BEEVOR, CHARLES EDWARD (1854–1908), neurologist, born in London on 12 June 1854, was eldest son of Charles Beevor, F.R.C.S., and Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Burrell. He received his early education at Blackheath proprietary school and at University College, London. Pursuing medical study at University College Hospital, he proceeded M.R.C.S. in 1878, M.B. London in 1879, M.D. London in 1881. In 1882 he became M.R.C.P. London, and in 1888 F.R.C.P. After holding the appointments of house physician at University College Hospital, and resident medical officer at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queen Square, W.C., he went abroad in 1882–3, and studied under the great teachers, including Obersteiner, Weigert, Cohnheim, and Erb, at Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris. On his return in 1883 he was appointed assistant physician to Queen Square Hospital, and to the Great Northern Hospital in 1885. In course of time he became full physician to both institutions, offices which he held until his death.

From 1883 to 1887 Beevor was engaged with (Sir) Victor Horsley in experimental research on the localisation of cerebral functions, especially with regard to the course and origin of the motor tracts. This work crystallised the truth of the results obtained by previous investigators, and established the reputation of the authors (Phil. Trans. clxxxi. 1890; also 1887–9). In 1903 Beevor delivered the Croonian lectures before the Royal College of Physicians, on ‘Muscular Movements and their Representation in the Central Nervous System’ (published in 1904), a classical piece of work entailing prodigious labour and painstaking observation. In 1907 he delivered before the Medical Society of London the Lettsomian lectures on ‘The Diagnosis and Localisation of Cerebral Tumours.’ He contributed many papers on subjects connected with neurology to ‘Brain’ and other medical journals, and in 1898 he published a ‘Handbook on Diseases of the Nervous System,’ which became a leading text-book. His most important work, however, was embodied in a paper on ‘The Distribution of the Different Arteries supplying the Brain,’ which was published in the ‘Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society’ in 1908. After many attempts, he succeeded in injecting simultaneously the five arteries of the brain with different coloured substances held in solution in gelatin. By this means he determined exactly the blood supply to different parts of the brain, and showed that the distribution of blood is purely anatomical, and does not vary according to the physiological action of the parts. Until this work was published, no book contained an accurate description of the cerebral arterial circulation. The importance of Beevor's discovery was not only from the anatomical side but also from the pathological, for it enables the physician to know the exact portions of the brain which are liable to undergo softening when any particular artery is blocked by a clot of blood.

In May 1908 he went by invitation to America. There his lectures on his own subjects were received with enthusiasm at Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Boston by the members of the American Neurological Society, and by those of the