Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/900

 PETTIGEEW.

883

"^The Jester's Merry Thought," 1883. Mr. Pettie was elected a Eoyal Academician Dec. 22, 1873, 1 in place of the l&te Sir Edwin | Landseer.

PETTIGEEW, James Bbll, j M.D., F.K.S., was born at Roxhill, Lanarkshire, Scotland, May 26, I 1834. On his mother's side (Mary ' Bell) he is closely related to the { famous Henry Bell, the father of ! steam navigation in Europe. He ' was educated at the Free West j Academy of Airdrie, and at the i Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1861 he graduated in medicine at Edinburgh with first- class honours. In 1858-9 he carried j off Professor John Gtjodsir's Senior ' Anatomy Gold Medal for the best , treatise " On the Arrangement of the Muscular Fibres in the Ven- I tricles of the Vertebrate Heart." This treatise procured for him the appointment of Croonian Lecturer to the Eoyal Society of London for 1860. His next successful effort was in the Class of Medical Juris- prudence, where he gained the annual gold medal (1860) for an essay "On the Presumption of Sur- vivorship." In 1860 he was elected president of the Eoyal Medical Society. On graduatiiig in medi- cine in 1861, he selected as the subject of his inaugural disser- tation, "The Ganglia and Nerves of the Heart, and their connec- tion with the Cerebro-spinal and Sympathetic Systems in Mam- malia," for which he received a graduation gold medal. In 1861 e became house surgeon to Pro- fessor Syme at the Eoyal In- firmary of Edinburgh. In 1862 he obtained the post of Assistant Curator of the Hunterian Museum . of the Eoyal College of Surgeons of London. Here he remained for five years. During the period in ques- tion (1862-67) he added about 600 finished dissections, injections, and casts to the museum. In addition to museum work he wrote several important memoirs, each memoir

being splendidly illustrated by dissections and drawings. In 1867 Dr. Pettigrew retired from the Hunterian Museum, owing to ill- health, and spent two years in the South of Ireland, where he amused himself with field sports and in studying the flight of insects, bats, and birds. He also experimented largely at this period on the sub- ject of artificial flight. In 1869 he was made a Fellow of the Eoyal Society of London, and, in the autumn of this year, he returned to Edinburgh, having been ap- pointed Curator of the Museum of the Eoyal CoUege of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and Pathologist to the Eoyal Infirmary of Edinburgh. There he continued his anatomical and physiological researches, parti- cularly his flight researches, and in 1870 he produced a memoir "On the Physiology of Wings, being an analysis of the movements by which Flight is produced in the Insect, Bird, and Bat" (Trans. Eoy. Soc. of Edin., vol. xxvi. pp. 321-446). At this period he added numerous specimens to the Museum of the Eoyal College of Surgeons ; these with the other specimens deposited in the Hunterian Museum of the Eoyal College of Surgeons of Eng- land, and the Anatomical Museum of the University of Edinburgh, amounting to considerably over 1000. He also gave daily demon- strations in morbid anatomy at the Eoyal Infirmary of Edinburgh to large classes of students. In 1872 he gave a course of twelve lectures to the president and fellows of the Eoyal College of Surgeons of Edin- burgh, " On the the Physiology of the Circulation in Plants, in the Lower Animals, and in Man." They were published in 1874. In 1872 Dr. Pettigrew was made a Fellow of the Eoyal Society of Edinbtirgh, and a member of other learned societies. In 1873 he was elected a Fellow of the Eoyal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and ap- pointed Examiner in Physiology to 3 l2