Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 25.djvu/31

 with whom Powell sided, barricaded the theatre, and Harris, supported by Rutherford, broke it forcibly open. Legal proceedings and a pamphlet warfare [for which see ] followed. On 23 July 1770 a legal decision of the commissioners of the great seal reinstated Colman as acting manager, subject to the advice and inspection, but not the control, of his fellows. Powell meanwhile had died 3 July 1769. On the resignation, 26 May 1774, by Colman of his post, Harris undertook the duties of stage-manager, which he discharged until his death. He was accused of sacrificing to spectacle the best interests of the drama. He behaved liberally to actors, however, and maintained a good reputation and some personal popularity. A daughter died in 1802, aged 15, and a son, George, lived to be a captain in the royal navy. A sister of Harris married into the family of the Longmans, the well-known publishers, and in the present possession of the Longman family is a portrait of Harris by Opie, showing him a fresh-complexioned, cultivated-looking man. A large number of documents—mortgages to his brother-in-law Longman of Harris's share in Covent Garden and the like—are also in the hands of the Longmans, and, while throwing little light on the life of Harris, are curious as regards the history of Covent Garden. Harris died on 1 Oct. 1820 at his cottage near Wimbledon, and was buried in his family vault at Hillingdon, near Uxbridge. 

HARRIS, WALTER, M.D. (1647–1732), physician, born in Gloucester in 1647, was a scholar of Winchester College, and thence went to New College, Oxford, of which society he was elected a fellow in 1666. He took his B.A. degree on 10 Oct. 1670. Soon after he joined the church of Rome, resigned his fellowship, and went to study medicine in France. He graduated M.D. at Bourges on 20 July 1675, and settled in London in 1676. Three years later, during the commotions about a popish plot, he published ‘A Farewell to Popery,’ 1679, and soon after was incorporated M.D. at Cambridge. He was elected a fellow of the College of Physicians 30 Sept. 1682, was five times censor, four times (1699, 1707, 1713, and 1726) Harveian orator, and treasurer from 1714 to 1717 inclusive. From 1710 to 1732 he delivered the Lumleian lectures at the College of Physicians. His first medical book was published in 1683, ‘Pharmacologia Anti-Empirica, or a Rational Discourse of Remedies both Chymical and Galenical,’ and gives a popular account of the six great remedies, mercury, antimony, vitriol, iron, bark (quinine), and opium, with explanations of the nature of several superstitious remedies, such as broth in which gold had been boiled for consumption, amulets, and charms. A very empty essay on the causes of gout is intercalated, with no discoverable reason but that the Duke of Beaufort, to whom the whole work is dedicated, was threatened with attacks of that disorder. Harris was physician in ordinary to Charles II in 1683, and soon after the revolution he was appointed physician to William III, and in 1694 attended Queen Mary in her last illness. He has described (Observations on several grievous Diseases) the stages and appearances of the hæmorrhagic eruption of small-pox, of which she died, and mentions that he sat up with her throughout the night succeeding the sixth day of her disease. She died two days later, and he was present at the post-mortem examination of her body. King William took him with him to Holland on his campaign there, and probably talked to him of gardening, as on his return Harris published ‘A Description of the King's Royal Palace and Garden at Loo,’ London, 1699. While in Holland he published at Amsterdam (1698) ‘De morbis acutis Infantum,’ a work which acquired a reputation beyond its merits, was translated into English (1742), French (1730), and German (1713), and was not supplanted by any other work in England till the publication in 1784 of the much more valuable treatise of Michael Underwood [q. v.] It is written in imitation of Sydenham, whom Harris knew and admired, but it lacks the sound basis of long clinical observation which makes Sydenham's work of permanent value. When Harris asked Sydenham for advice as to his medical studies, the great physician is said to have told him to read ‘Don Quixote,’ meaning that he should learn from Cervantes how accurate a knowledge of man may be gained by observation. (Dr. Johnson tells the same story of Richard Blackmore [q. v.], who also applied to Sydenham for advice.) Harris did not possess sufficient ability to profit by Sydenham's counsel. In 1707 he printed his Harveian oration, and in 1720 published in London ‘De morbis aliquot gravioribus Observationes,’ of which the most interesting part is his account of Queen Mary's illness and death. ‘De Peste Dissertatio,’ London, 1721, and ‘Dissertationes Medicæ et Chirurgicæ habitæ in amphitheatro collegii regalis medicorum Londiniensium,’ 1725, are his remaining medical works. The dissertations are his Lumleian lectures, and con-