Published Resources Details
Book Section
- Title
- Barrett, Sir James William (1862-1945), ophthalmologist and publicist
- In
- Australian dictionary of biography, volume 7: 1891 - 1939 A-Ch
- Imprint
- Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 186-189
- Url
- https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/barrett-sir-james-william-64
- Format
- Description
Published online in 2006.
- Abstract
Quote: "In 1876 he matriculated and entered the University of Melbourne (M.B., 1881; Ch.B., 1882); he was the first secretary of the Medical Students' Society in 1880. He worked for two years as a resident medical officer at the Melbourne Hospital where he became a strong advocate of antisepsis and gathered powerful statistical evidence against the old ways; in 1883 he published his first paper, Typhoid Fever in Victoria. In October he went to London (M.R.C.S., 1884; F.R.C.S., 1887); his professor at King's College, G. F. Yeo, remarked on his earnestness, quickness, assiduity, urbanity, and courtesy. He taught at King's College, Moorfields Ophthalmic Hospital and elsewhere, gaining his main source of income from coaching in physiology for F.R.C.S. examinations, and visited Austria and Germany, where he met Robert Koch. He developed a lifelong affection for German language, literature and music, together with an attachment to the scientific rationality and agnosticism of Thomas Huxley. He researched into the anatomy of the mammalian eye, published seventeen papers, and decided to spend his life in London on investigative work, but in 1886 he was called back to Australia for family reasons."
- Source
- Carey 2003