FLETCHER 392 FLETCHER here he was granted the degree of F. F. P. and S., Glasgow, 1877. He practised at Stanley, New Brunswick, but moved to Sack- ville in 1871, where he remained ten years, moving in 1881 to Brandon, Manitoba. While at Sackville a sick man was landed. The case turned out to be one of small-pox and many were not vaccinated. Dr. Fleming had a tent erected and attended to the man night and day, and there were no other cases. Dr. Fleming was a typical family physician and as such was the trusted friend of all his patients, more especially of the poor. It is said to have been touching to see the many poor who came, before the funeral, to have a last look at one who had been so good and kmd to them; he even sacrificed his home and interests for such patients. He married Louisa Gain Biden in 1867, and had ten children. He died at his home in Brandon, November 2.S, 1897, of angina pec- toris. A monument was erected to his memory by the people of Brandon, an obelisk twenty- seven and one-half feet in height, quarried in Brandon and donated for the purpose by the Canadian Pacific Railway. T.ASPi;ii Halpennv. Fletcher, Robert (1823-1912). Robert Fletcher, one of the most eminent medical scholars and bibliographers of recent times was born at Bristol, England, March 6, 1823, where his father was a local attor- ney and accountant. After completing his preliminary studies, he was bred to the law. When he had spent two years in his father's office, he decided to study medicine, entered the Bristol Medical School in 1839, and com- pleted his course at the London Hospital, becoming a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in 1844. In 1843 he married Miss Hannah Howe, of Bristol, and wishing to try his fortunes in the new world, crossed the ocean with his young wife, and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1847. When the Civil War broke out, he became surgeon of the First Regiment of Ohio Volunteers (1861), and, after three years' active service in the field, was commissioned surgeon. United States Volunteers, in charge of Hospital No. 7, at Nashville, Tennessee, and became subsequent- ly medical purveyor of the army at the same post, receiving, at the end of the war, the brevets of lieutenant-colonel and colonel "for faithful and meritorious services." In 1871 he was transferred to the Provost Marshal's Bureau in the War Department at Washing- ton, then in charge of Colonel Jedediah H. Baxter, United States Army, took an active part in the preparation of the two volumes of anthropometric statistics issued by that ofiice (1875), and was the author of a treatise on anthropometry which prefaces this valuable work. In 1876 he became associated with Dr. John S. Billings (q. v.) in the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, the nucleus of which, begun in Surgeon-General Lovell's (q. V.) time (prior to 1836), was a small coU lection of some three or four hundred books at the beginning of the Civil War, the library now containing 'upwards of half a million vol- umes and jjamphlets. In building up this great collection. Dr. Billings had early con- ceived the idea of printing a subject-index of the medical literature of the world, and, in 1876, he published a "Specimen Fasciculus of a Catalogue" of the Library, in effect a com- bined index of authors and subjects arranged in dictionary order in a single alphabet, which was submitted to the medical profession for criticism. A little later Dr. Fletcher was assigned to duty in the Library and be- came the principal assistant in the redac- tion of the Index Catalogue, the first vol- umes of which were printed in 1880. After the completion of the first series in 189S, Dr. Billings was retired from the army at his own request, becoming professor of hygiene in the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently director of the New York Public Library, and the redaction of the second series remained in I charge of Dr. Fletcher. To this work Dr. I Fletcher gave his rare scholarship and his ex- traordinary capacity for close and intensive ■ proof-reading, and his labors were often car- ried, as Dr. Billings has said, "far beyond mere routine or the limits of office hours"; indeed, he continued to read the proof down to the beginning of his last illness. The Index Mcdi- cxis, in which Dr. Billings and Dr. Fletcher were associated as editors, was begun as an extra-official publication in 1879, running through twenty-one volumes (1879-99). In 1903 it was revived, under generous patron- age of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with Dr. Fletcher as editor-in-chief (1903-11). During the years 1884-88, Dr. Fletcher was lecturer on medical jurisprudence at the Columbian University, Washington, D. C, and at the Johns Hopkins University from 1897 till 1903. He is described as a clear' and at- tractive lecturer, very popular with his classes. He was president of the anthro- pological, philosophical and literary socie- ties of Washington, as also of the Cosmos Club, Many honors were paid him in his later years, in particular the banquet given to him
