The Times/1919/Obituary/Joseph Baldwin Nias

DR. J. B. NIAS

By the death of Dr. Joseph Baldwin Nias on February 20 the medical profession loses one who approximated very closely to the type of the learned physician of the old school.

Born at Bath on December 13, 1857, Dr. Nias was the eldest son of Admiral Sir Joseph Nias K.C.B. He entered Exeter College, Oxford, in 1875, after spending five years at Winchester, and was elected to an open scholarship in science in 1876. He was placed in the first class in the final school of natural science in 1879, and afterwards proceeded to St. Bartholomew's Hospital. where he held the usual; offices and acted as house physician to Sir William Selby Church. In 1882 he was elected Burdett-Coutts scholar and Radcliffe Travelling Fellow at Oxford. On his return form the Continental tour enjoined by the statutes of the fellowship, he was admitted a Bachelor of Medicine in 1883 and a member of the Royal College of Physicians. Ten years afterwards he graduated M.D. at Oxford with a thesis "On Mastication in Young Children." He settled in practice in South Kensington, where he remained until his death.

A sound practitioner with a bias towards bacteriology, Nias will best be remembered by two pieces of work which are so thorough that they will not need to be done again. He compiled a report on the Greek Manuscripts contained in the library of the Medical Society of London, which was published in 1905, and in 1918 the Clarendon Press issued his sketch of the life of Dr. John Radcliffe. with an account of his Fellows and Foundations. The latter piece of work had occupied much of his spare time for many years, and it was a source of great satisfaction to him that he had lived to complete it.