Obituary

British Heartjoumal, I970, 32, 122.

Hugh Barber

Hugh Barber, who died recently at the age of
92, had been a distinguished physician at
Derby for sixty years. He was a student at
Guy's in the last years of the nineteenth cen-
tury when Henry Howse, who had journeyed
to Edinburgh in I870 to study Lister's anti-
septic methods and introduced them to Guy's,
was a senior surgeon.

Barber was born at Sheffield in I877, the
son of Christopher Barber, a stockbroker, and
came of a Quaker family with long medical
traditions. After schooling at York, and Owens
College, Manchester, he came to Guy's and,
like many others, loved it all his life.
Here he did well and after the usual house

appointments was chosen as Medical Regis-
trar for I903-06, days when there were only
two of them. Then, as he wanted to get
married, he decided to join Dr. George Price
in family practice at Derby. Probably he felt
sure that Arthur Hurst would be the next
physician on the staff, and he was appointed
the next year. Hurst had been his pupil and
often emphasized what a fine teacher Barber
had been as registrar.

Barber played cricket and football for Guy's
and the United Hospitals. He had already
captained Yorkshire's second eleven and twice
played for their first eleven.
Two years after going to Derby, he became

physician to the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary.
In 1914 -i8 he served as pathologist to the 39th
General Hospital, B.E.F. in France. After the
war his consulting work increased consider-
ably and he took the membership of the Royal
College of Physicians in I926 and was made a
Fellow in 1933, only the second to practise
in Derby. He became a member of the
Association of Physicians in 1929, then an un-
usual distinction for a physician of a non-
teaching hospital. He founded the East Mid-
lands Society of Physicians in 1943, the first of
many similar regional societies. Having won
the Derbyshire golf championship in 19I3,
he still played for the county when he was 60.
His wife died thirty years before him and

one daughter, a distinguished bacteriologist
at Hammersmith, was killed in a motor acci-
dent. But two daughters survive him and

nothing gave him greater happiness than tak-
ing his grandchildren up Scafell Pikes and
Great Gable.

Barber's most important work was as a
physician because, in addition to his extensive
knowledge of medicine and commonsense, he
had wide understanding of and deep sympa-
thy with most men and women. His work on
renal rickets or renal osteodystrophy and on
traumatic injury to the heart, especially 'A fatal
case of myocardial contusion' and 'Electro-
cardiographic changes due to trauma' (British
Heartjournal, I941, 3, 127; I942,4,83), were
additional distinctions. It was partly for this
paper that he was elected to the British
Cardiac Society.
M.C. writes 'Here I grew to like him and

admire him and we had many talks at their
meetings during the next fifteen years. He
gave me his 1959 book The Rewards of Medi-
cine and Other Essays, many of which had
appeared in the Guy's Hospital Gazette. It is
an excellent bedside book for any doctor.
There are interesting chapters on Erasmus
Darwin, who had practised at Derby more
than a century before him and suggested a
theory of evolution long before his grandson

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Obituary 123

Charles Darwin persuaded the world with
The Origin of Species; and on the sort of
medical history he would like to have been
taught as a student. Others were on the medi-
cal wisdom of Jane Austen, on Smollett, and
why every doctor should read The Expedition
of Humphrey Clinker, and on the act of dying,
a subject not discussed as often as it should be.
In The Value of Fiction in Medical Education
he suggests there should be an examination
for doctors or perhaps debates on several
questions including: Have the young ladies
described by Jane Austen and the modem
girl much in common? Would the maiden
lady in Cranford who rolled a ball under the
bed to exclude a hidden burglar have been less
courageous than ourselves in air raids ? His
earlier book The Occasion Fleeting shows how
a physician trained in observational medicine
felt, thought, and spoke in the first half of the
twentieth century.'
M.L. writes: 'Medical Derby was shaped

by Hugh Barber, and there was never one so
warmly regarded and deeply respected as he.

'Physicians of my vintage came to know
him when he was already in his eighties, but,
because of his lively kindness and interest,
the years fell away from the legend, and he
became our good friend and wise contempor-
ary. He illuminated our meetings, refreshed
us with his clinical sense, and enthralled us
with his personal memories of William Osler
and W. G. Grace.
'The summer meeting of the Cardiac

Society, with the sight of his old friends, was
his particular pleasure. When tragedy be-
reaved him, we held our breath and feared
the outcome, until we saw the quality that
was courage holding him together.
'A little longer, and on his ninetieth birth-

day, we all sat around him in friendship, with
Charles Baker to make the link with Guy's
and complete his happiness. Hugh Barber
was not a sentimental man, and would not
have us be so, but his was a special simple
greatness that we shall remember.'
MAURICE CAMPBELL
MICHAEL LEVEAUX

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