Richardson, SIR BENJAMIN WARD, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., physician, author, and inventor, was born at Somerby, Leicestershire, 31st October 1828. He studied at Anderson's College, Glasgow, took the diploma in 1850 of the faculty of Physicians and Surgeons, and graduated in medicine at St Andrews in 1854. He was a frequent contributor to the Medical Times and Gazette, and gained the Fothergillian gold medal for an essay on 'Diseases of the Fœtus in Utero,' and the Astley-Cooper prize of 300 guineas in 1856 for an essay on the 'Coagulation of the Blood.' Dr Richardson's medical inventions include a double-valve inhaler for chloroform, an ether spray tube, apparatus for embalming, a mask for workers in dust, a lethal chamber for painless extinction of the life of lower animals, &c. He has tried various new anaesthetics, and discovered the controlling influence of nitrite of amyl over tetanus. He has written and lectured on total abstinence, public health, and many medical and scientific subjects, and popularised many facts in sanitary science. He founded the Journal of Public Health in 1855 and the Social Science Review in 1862, and a quarterly journal, entirely written by himself, The Asclepiad, in 1861 and 1884 onwards. In 1868 he was presented with 1000 guineas and a microscope by 600 medical brethren and friends. He was knighted in 1893, and died 21st November 1896. See his autobiographical Vita Medica (1897).
His published works and essays are numerous, including Cause of the Coagulation of the Blood (1856); Alcohol, its Action and its Use (1869); Cantor Lectures on Alcohol (1875); Hygeia, A Model City of Health (1876); Diseases of Modern Life (1876); Moderate Drinking (1879); A Review of the Life and Work of Edwin Chadwick (2 vols. 1887); Common Health (1887); National Health (1890); Life of Sopwith (1891).