William Stokes : his Life and Work (1804-1878). By his
Son, William Stokes, Surgeon-in-Ordinary to the Queen in Ireland. (T. Fisher Unwin.)—Without rising to the eminence of the great Englishmen whose lives have preceded his in the series of "Masters of Medicine "—Hunter, Harvey, and Simpson—Stokes was a man who accomplished a large amount of useful pro- fessional work, both as a teacher and practitioner in Dublin, where most of his life was spent, and as the author of various works on the stethoscope, on diseases of the chest and of the heart and aorta, and on fever. He was one of the first and most strenuous advocates of the use of the stethoscope in the British Islands, and he witnessed the first ease of cholera in Ireland, and several great fever epidemics. In private life he seems to have been a man of wide and varied sympathies, very fortunate in his domestic and social surroundings, and free from any trace of pro- fessional jealousy. Politics he carefully avoided, though the political troubles of his time caused him much pain and anxiety. Next to medicine, archaeology seems to have been his favourite
study, and one of his last works was a Life of his friend, George Petrie, " archreologist, painter, musician, and man of letters." The book contains various anecdotes, sketches of travel, &c., which will interest those who are not students of medicine. We have noticed a few misprints (some of them, unfortunately, in dates), which should be corrected in a second edition. The book is illustrated by a portrait of Stokes ; a drawing of the statue by Foley in the hall of the College of Physicians, in Dublin; and a view of St Platen's Church, on the western elope of the Hill of Howth, where Stokes and his wife, and some of his children, are buried.
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