William Bulloch.

  • John Ledingham
Date:
1941
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: William Bulloch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    During the first ten or twelve years of his work at the London, Bulloch accomplished a considerable amount of original research on various themes, and his chief contributions to knowledge as distinct from his historical work belono; in fact to this brief period. Even during this period, however, it became clear that he derived his one real interest and pleasure from his almost daily attendance after hospital hours in the medical libraries, where he could run down the beginnings and landmarks of a topical subject with scrupulous accuracy and surprising speed, so familiar was he with ways of getting rapidly down to work in libraries. Wide and continuous reading among the archives tended perhaps to inhibit what urge he had towards original and constructive investigation, or led him to abandon investigations when only half exploited. As Turnbull has said, ‘Bulloch’s knowledge of former good work tended to limit his laboratory research; he was apt to think that a subject had already been exhausted’. In the course of a lecture he gave at St Mary’s Hospital in 1921 on the use and abuse of scientific medical litera¬ ture, he makes the plea that a study of the work of others may afford a clue to the knowledge still required to elucidate some disease, and there is no doubt that he was Justified in believing that much that deserves unearthing lies buried in the archives. Bulloch’s reputation will in any case rest far more surely on his contributions to medical history and biography than on those to new knowledge based on experimental research. Fortunately during these first ten years of tenure of his London Hospital post Bulloch had with him a succession of seriously disposed voluntary workers and pupils with some of whom valuable co-operative work was accomplished. Of these I may mention J. J. R. Macleod, William Hunter (later of Hong-Kong), R. D. Keith (later of Singapore), P. Fildes, J. McIntosh, F. W. Twort, G. T. Western, E. E. Atkin, Major Greenwood, H. M. Turnbull and John Craw. In 1900 Bulloch published a description of an exceedingly useful anaerobic Jar in which anaerobiosis was secured by evacuation of air followed by replacement with hydrogen or t|
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