Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 62.djvu/210

 [q. v.], he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1835, and graduated M.D. at Aberdeen in 1849. He had to pay the expenses of his own medical education, and did so by acting as a reporter for the ‘Times’ in the gallery of the House of Commons, and by writing small manuals for students on osteology, and on practical midwifery. In 1839 he published anonymously ‘Physic and Physicians,’ in two volumes, a collection of miscellaneous anecdotes about physicians and surgeons; and in 1840 ‘The Anatomy of Suicide,’ an endeavour to demonstrate that most suicides are not criminal, but are victims of mental disease. This was followed in 1843 by ‘The Plea of Insanity in Criminal Cases,’ and in 1845 by ‘The Incubation of Insanity.’ He was now regarded by the public as an authority in cases of insanity, and in 1847 opened two private lunatic asylums at Hammersmith, where he employed the humane method of treating lunatics which is now universal, but was then regarded as on its trial. He founded the ‘Quarterly Journal of Psychological Medicine’ in 1848, and continued it for sixteen years. When the Earl of Derby was installed as chancellor of the university of Oxford, the honorary degree of D.C.L. was conferred on Winslow on 9 June 1853. He continued to write numerous papers on insanity and on its relation to the laws, and in 1860 published ‘On the Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind,’ a work containing many interesting cases. In 1865, after recovering from a serious illness, he wrote ‘Light and its Influence’ and a short essay ‘On Uncontrollable Drunkenness.’ He was examined before a committee of the House of Commons in 1872 on this subject. The frequent establishment of the plea of insanity in criminal cases was largely due to his influence, and he was called as a witness in many celebrated trials. He died at Brighton on 3 March 1874, and was buried at Epping. The ‘Medical Circular’ for 16 March 1853 contains his portrait, engraved from a daguerreotype. One of his sons, Lyttelton Stewart Winslow, graduated in medicine and pursued the same studies.

[British Medical Journal, 1874, vol. i.; Medical Circular, 1853, vol. ii.; Lancet, 14 March 1874; Journal of Psychological Medicine, 1875, vol. i., edited by L. S. Winslow, M.D.; Works.] 

WINSOR, FREDERICK ALBERT (1763–1830), one of the pioneers of gas-lighting, son of Friedrich Albrecht Winzer, was born in Brunswick in 1763. There is some reason to suppose that he was educated in Hamburg, where he early acquired English, and he seems to have resided in England before 1799. He appears to have been primarily a company-promoting ‘expert,’ but he was specially interested in the question of economic fuel, and in 1802, being then in Frankfort, he made a visit to Paris expressly to investigate the thermo-lamps which Philippe Lebon (d. 1804) had first exhibited in 1786, and for which he had obtained a brevet in 1799. William Murdock [q. v.] had been working in England upon somewhat similar lines (traced in the first instance, he admits, ‘by Dr. John Clayton, as far back as 1739’), and his experiments first yielded gas as a practical illuminant between 1792 and 1798, when he erected gasworks at the well-known Soho manufactory of Boulton & Watt, near Birmingham. A like project had been entertained by Archibald Cochrane, ninth earl of Dundonald [q. v.], in 1782–3; but, except in the case of Murdock and Lebon, experiments in gas-lighting had not progressed further than ‘philosophical fireworks,’ such as were exhibited by a German named Diller (d. 1789) in London. Diller appears to have taken his ‘fireworks’ to Paris and exhibited them to the Académie des Sciences (see Journal de Physique, September 1787). Similar ‘fireworks’ were exhibited by Cartwright at the Lyceum Theatre in May 1800 (Times, 17 May). The inhabitants of London were, nevertheless, extremely sceptical as to the feasibility of gas-lighting when Winsor returned to England at the close of 1803 and commenced a series of lectures at the Lyceum Theatre (for an advertisement of the lectures see Times, 21 Sept. 1804). He kept secret as a profound mystery his method of procuring and purifying the gas; but he showed the method of conveying it to the different rooms of a house. He exhibited a chandelier ‘in the form of a long flexible tube suspended from the ceiling communicating at the end with a burner, designed with much taste, being a cupid grasping a torch with one hand and holding the tube with the other.’ He explained how the form of the flame could be modified, and demonstrated that the flame was not liable to be extinguished by wind or rain, that it produced no smoke, and did not scatter dangerous sparks. His perseverance and sanguine temper are said to have been of the greatest service in making the matter known to the public, but he was deficient both in chemical knowledge and in mechanical skill. He obtained a hold over the mind of a retired coach-maker named Kenzie, who lived in Queen Street, Hyde Park, and this patron lent him his premises for gasworks. 