Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/397

 and was formally appointed there the first permanent lecturer on public health in 1891. He was elected F.R.S. on 5 June 1890, and was awarded the Stewart prize of the British Medical Association in 1893. In 1895 he succeeded Sir John Simon as crown nominee at the General Medical Council, and in 1898 honorary degrees were conferred upon him by the university of Edinburgh, the Royal University of Ireland, and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, while his services to public health were recognised by his selection as an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Medicine at Rome, corresponding member of the Royal Italian Society of Hygiene, and foreign associate of the Society of Hygiene of France. He was president of the Epidemiological Society from 1887 to 1889, and in 1898 he delivered the Harben lectures 'On the Administrative Control of Tuberculosis.' He was made C.B. in 1892, and K.C.B. in 1897. He died on 18 Dec. 1899, and is buried at St. John's, Woking. He married in 1866 Martha, daughter of Joseph Rylands of Sutton Grange, Hull, by whom he had four children : three sons and a daughter.

Thorne ranks as one of the foremost exponents of the science of public health, both at home and abroad, and he worthily filled the position occupied in succession by Sir Edwin Chadwick, Sir John Simon, and Sir George Buchanan. His acumen first proved that, as had long been suspected, typhoid fever was a water-borne disease. It was his energy that gave an impulse to the establishment of hospitals for the isolation of infectious disease, which are now common in every part of the country. Throughout Europe his name is inseparably connected with attempts to abolish the expensive and tedious methods of quarantine in favour of a higher standard of cleanliness combined with the early and efficient notification of individual cases of epidemic disease.

Almost the whole of Sir Richard Thorne-Thorne's work is recorded in the form of reports in the blue-books of the medical department of the privy council and the local government board. The Milroy lectures on diphtheria were published in 12mo, London, 1891.  TORRENS, HENRY WHITELOCK (1806–1852), Indian civil servant, was the eldest son of General Sir Henry Torrens [q. v.], and was born at Canterbury on 20 May 1806. He was educated at a private school at Brook Green, and afterwards at the Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was admitted student in 1823, and matriculated on 16 Dec.; he had the honour to be rusticated along with the Duke of Wellington's sons for painting the doors of the college red. After graduating B.A. in 1828 he began to read for the bar, a profession entirely unsuitable to his mercurial and ebullient temperament. A clerkship in the foreign office was procured for him, but was almost immediately exchanged for an Indian writership, which he was induced to accept by a promise of patronage from Lord William Bentinck, then (1828) on the point of proceeding to India as governor-general. So far as Lord William was concerned the undertaking was redeemed, but kings were to arise who knew not Joseph. It was also most unfortunate for Torrens to have entered the service without having imbibed its spirit and traditions by a previous course at Haileybury. He seemed, however, fully to justify his appointment by his general ability and his rapid progress in the oriental languages, especially Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani. His first appointment was that of assistant to the collector at Meerut, July 1829. By January 1835 he had worked his way into the secretariat, and in 1837 he was in a position, according to Sir John Kaye, to aid Macnaghten and Colvin in bringing about the Afghan war by his personal influence as one of the secretaries in attendance upon Lord Auckland, who was then at Simla, remote from the steadying influence of his council at Calcutta. Torrens denied the imputation; it seems clear, however, upon his own showing, that he did recommend interference in the affairs of Afghanistan, although he had not come to the point of advocating an actual British invasion. A recent publication of documents, nevertheless, has proved that Lord Auckland's prudent reluctance was not overcome by the advice of his secretaries, which advice he rejected somewhat cavalierly, but by what he conceived to be an imperative instruction from home (see Life of J. Russell Colvin).

In 1838 Torrens published that firet volume of a translation of the 'Arabian Nights' which chiefly preserves his name as a man of letters. In 1840 he edited C. Lassen's 'Points in the History of the Greek and Indo-Scythian Kings' (Calcutta, 1840, 8vo), and in the same year he was made secretary to the board of customs at Calcutta, and in this capacity effected important reforms in the excise department. In April 1847 he was 