Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement/Buchanan, George (1831-1895)
BUCHANAN, Sir GEORGE (1831–1895), physician, the elder son of George Adam Buchanan, was born in Myddelton Square, Islington, where his father was in general medical practice, on 5 Nov. 1831, He received his early education at University College School, and in 1851, after graduating B. A. in the university of London, he entered University College as a medical student. After a distinguished career both at the college and university he graduated M.B, London in 1854 and was admitted M.D. in the following year.
lie then became resident medical officer at the London Fever Hospital, where he afterwards served as physician (1861-1868) and consulting physician. He was admitted a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1858, and at that date he was practising as a physician in Gower Street, holding the post of assistant physician to the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street. In 1866 Buchanan was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, where he served the office of censor, 1892-4, and Lettsomian lecturer in 1867, He was president of the Epidemiological Society in 1881, and in 1882 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
Buchanan was attracted gradually to the science of public health. In 1867 he was appointed medical officer of health to the St. Giles's district, then notorious because its death rate was one-fifth higher than that of the whole metropolis. His reports on the sanitary condition of his district were soon recognised as masterpieces, and in 1861 the medical department of the privy council began to employ him as an occasional inspector. In this capacity he carried out systematic inquiries into the local working of the vaccination laws and obtained results which were afterwards embodied in the amending act of 1867. For the privy council too he investigated and did much to secure the prevention and limitation of epidemic typhus in Lancashire during the cotton famine of 1862. He reported in 1866 upon a comprehensive inquiry carried out in a number of selected districts upon the effects (as regards decrease of mortality from several causes) of main drainage works and public water supply. This report led to the inference that phthisis was associated directly with dampness of soil : a conclusion established by further research (1867) upon the incidence of phthisis in the south-eastern counties of England. Dr. Buchanan became a permanent inspector in the medical department of the privy council in 1869, and when the work of this department was transferred to the local government board, he was appointed assistant medical officer. He became the principal medical officer on 31 Dec. 1879, and resigned the office in April 1892, when he was knighted.
He retained his interest in University College throughout his life, being elected a fellow in 1864, and serving in due course as a member of the council. He also took an active part in the affairs of the university of London, where, in 1858, he helped to obtain the representation of the graduates on the governing body by means of convocation, while he was one of the first graduates to be elected (in 1882) by convocation to the senate. He was foremost too among those who secured the admission of women to the classes of University College and to degrees at the university of London. He was also much interested in the affairs of the Society of Apothecaries, of which he was first a member and then one of the court of assistants. He was made an honorary LL.D. of the university of Edinburgh in 1893, and, after the death of Lord Basing, he was appointed chairman of the royal commission on tuberculosis.
Buchanan died on 5 May 1895 at 27 Woburn Square, and is buried at Brookwood cemetery, Woking, He married, first, Mary,
daughter of George Murphy ; secondly, Alice Mary Asmar, daughter of Dr. Edward Seaton, and left two sons and four daughters.
The unwearying efforts of (Sir) Edwin Chadwick [q.v. Suppl.], Sir John Simon, and George Buchanan raised England to the high position she holds among the nations of the world as an exponent of sanitary science. Buchanan in particular is remarkable for the services he rendered to medicine and pathology as well as to hygiene, by the indefatigable industry with which he collected and the keen criticism with which he sifted facts as well as by the scientific insight with which he interpreted their exact meaning. Sir John Simon says of him : 'He always rendered the very best service which the occasion required or permitted, and he was in various cases the author of reports which have become classical in sanitary literature.' Of thorough training and habit in all ordinary relations of practical medicine, highly informed in the sciences which assist it, and of sanitary experience such as only of late years has been possible to any man, and in his case many times larger and more various than almost any of his contemporaries could have had, Buchanan had always shown himself of an extraordinary active and discriminating mind, and always intent on that exactitude which is essential to scientific veracity, whether in observation of facts or in argument on them. In fact, Buchanan's services to the country were of the highest order. Not only did he by individual research and labour do much to secure the extinction of typhus fever where it was formerly endemic, but he was conspicuous in reducing the mortality from phthisis which was so appalling in the middle of this century, and in devising the means at present adopted successfully for controlling cholera when imported into England. In effect he created the central public health department of the state which now exists in England. When first transferred from the privy council to the local government board public health affairs, so for as government was concerned, seemed to be allowed small scope for development ; but by impressing on all his fellow workers, political as well as medical, his own enthusiasm, Buchanan made inevitable the evolution of the medical department of the local government board to one of the most important of the scientific departments either at home or abroad. Buchanan received a subscription on his retirement from the local government board in 1892, and he was thus able to endow, in 1894, a gold medal to be granted triennially by the Royal Society for distinguished services in sanitary science. The medal has on its obverse a bust of Sir George Buchanan executed by Wyon.
Buchanan's works have not been collected. They consist in the main of innumerable reports scattered through various parliamentary blue books.
[Obituary notices in the Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London, new series, iv. 113; Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. lix. 1895-6, and the British Medical Journal, i. 1006, 1895; additional information kindly given by Sir George Buchanan's son, Dr. George Seaton Buchanan, medical inspector to H. M. Local Government Board.]