The twilight of the Jenners / by Victor G. Plarr.

  • Victor Plarr
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The twilight of the Jenners / by Victor G. Plarr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    moment through being mentioned in William Henry’s letter to the Lancet in 1850, and on 3rd July, 1851, he dies quietly at Berkeley at the advanced age of eighty-four, and is dis- missed in a few civil lines in the same journal’s obituary notices.* The time of George Jenner’s decease we do not know, but William Henry Jenner apparently died in 1859. His death is unchronicled in the leading medical journals, but we arrive at it by the customary process of exhaustion known to medical antiquarians, for in 1859 his name drops from the Royal College of Surgeons’ lists. In July, i860, he is cer- tainly dead, for we find the Lancet, loyal as of yore to the cause of the Jenners, deploring the fact that the claim of his widow to assistance has twice been ignored by the Royal Medical Benevolent College, and that she is now for the third time a candidate. “Is it not a reproach to England that any one bearing the name of Jenner should be in want? ” So much for the living : and now for their effigies. On his walks through Kensington Gardens many a London medical man must have become familiar with the statue of Edward Jenner, planted, remote and irrelevant, in the little patch of Florentine landscape at the western end of the Serpentine. What has he to do with this part of London any more than Shakespeare with Leicester Square ? The answer is that he is indeed in banishment. While his great-nephew was perhaps dying, Edward Jenner was being honoured with a statue at last. Baron, Jenner’s biographer, and the Lancet had bravely worked for this consummation. Calder Mar- shall’s statue was solemnly inaugurated at the Royal College of Physicians in May, 1858. No Jenners seem to have been present, but Prince Albert and a distinguished company did honour to a great man’s memory. The statue, however, was not permitted to remain in Trafalgar Square. The Tunes and orators in both Houses of Parliament held that a man who has saved much life excites comparisons when found in the neighbourhood of famous slayers of men. Perhaps the * It is of interest to note that he was of great assistance to his first master, John Hunter, conjointly with Sir Joseph Banks, in forming the Hunterian Collection.
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