Fothergillian gold medal by the Medical Society of London for an essay on the 'Diseases of the Foetus in Utero;' in 1856 he gained the Astley Cooper triennial prize of 300 guineas for his essay on 'The Coagulation of the Blood.' In 1868 he was elected president of the Medical Society of London, and on several occasions he was president of the health section of the Social Science Association, notably in 1875, when he delivered a celebrated address at Brighton on 'Hygeia,' in which he told of what a city should be if sanitary science were advanced in a proper manner. In the same year he gave the Cantor lectures at the Society of Arts, taking ' Alcohol ' as the subject. He was elected an honorary member of the Philosophical Society of America in 1863, and of the Imperial Leopold Carolina Academy of Sciences in 1867. He became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1877. In June 1893 he was knighted in recognition of his eminent services to humanitarian causes.
He died at 25 Manchester Square on 21 Nov. 1896, and his body was cremated at Brookwood, Surrey. He married, on 21 Feb. 1857, Mary J. Smith of Mortlake, by whom he left two surviving sons and one daughter.
Richardson was a sanitary reformer, who busied himself with many of the smaller details of domestic sanitation which tend in the aggregate to prolong the average life in each generation. He spent many years in attempts to relieve pain among men by discovering and adapting substances capable of producing general or local anæsthesia, and among animals by more humane methods of slaughter. He brought into use no less than fourteen anaesthetics, of which methylene bichloride is the best known, and he invented the first double-valved mouthpiece for use in the administration of chloroform. He also produced local insensibility by freezing the part with an ether spray, and he gave animals euthanasia by means of a lethal chamber. He was an ardent and determined champion of total abstinence, for he held that alcohol was so powerful a drug that it should only be used by skilled hands in the greatest emergencies. He was, too, one of the earliest advocates of bicycling. In 1863 he made known the peculiar properties of amyl nitrite, a drug which was largely used in the treatment of breast-pang, and he introduced the bromides of quinine, iron, and strychnia, ozonised ether, styptic and iodised colloid, peroxide of hydrogen, and ethylate of soda, substances which were soon largely used by the medical profession.
Richardson was one of the most prolific writers of his generation. He wrote biographies, plays, poems, and songs, in addition to his more strictly scientific work. He wrote the 'Asclepiad,' a series of original researches in the science, art, and literature of medicine. A single volume was issued in 1861, after which it appeared quarterly from 1884 to 1895. He was the originator and the editor of the 'Journal of Public Health and Sanitary Review' (1855). He contributed many articles, signed and unsigned, to the 'Lancet' and to the 'Medical Times and Gazette.'
[Vita Medica, chapters of medical life and work by Sir B. W. Richardson, London, 1897. The author was engaged upon the last pages of this book at the time of his death. See also obituary notice in the Lancet, 1896, ii. 1575; Yearbook of the Royal Soc. 1901, pp. 187-8.]
RIGBY, ELIZABETH, afterwards Lady Eastlake (1809–1893), author. [See Eastlake.]
RIVERS, AUGUSTUS HENRY LANE FOX PITT- (1827–1900), general and anthropologist. [See Pitt-Rivers.]
ROBERTS, Sir WILLIAM (1830–1899), physician, born at Bodedern, Anglesea, on 18 March 1830, was the eighth and youngest son of David Roberts, surgeon, of Mynydd-y-gof, and Sarah, his wife, daughter of Thomas Foulkes of Machynlleth, Montgomeryshire. He was educated at Mill Hill school, and entered University College, London, as a medical student in October 1849. Here he was early attracted to the study of physiology and graduated B. A. at the university of London in 1851, with the highest honours in chemistry and animal physiology. The same success attended him throughout his university career, and he graduated M.B. in 1853, after securing three gold medals, a scholarship, and an exhibition. In the same year he was admitted a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and in 1854 he graduated M.D. at the London University. He also pursued his medical studies in Paris and Berlin.
In 1854 Roberts was elected house-surgeon at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, and on 26 July 1855 was appointed full physician at the unusually early age of twenty-five; at the same time he became lecturer on anatomy and physiology in the Royal [Pine Street] School of Medicine at Manchester. In 1859 he was appointed lecturer on pathology, and in 1863 lecturer on the principles and practice
