Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 23.djvu/400

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Guy
392
Guy

children, and nursing four, six, or eight persons of the families of Wood or Guy; while 1,000l. was left to other persons for charitable purposes. The remainder of his fortune, amounting to more than 200,000l, was left to Sir Gregory Page, bart., Charles Joye, treasurer of St. Thomas's Hospital, and several other of its governors, including Dr. Richard Mead [q. v.], to complete his hospital for four hundred sick persons who might not be received into other hospitals from being deemed incurable, or only curable by long treatment; lunatics, up to the number of twenty, were to be received for similar reasons; but full discretion was given to the executors for varying the application of the funds. The executors and trustees were desired to procure an act of parliament incorporating them with other persons named, all governors of St. Thomas's, to the number of fifty, with a president and treasurer; they were to purchase lands, ground rents, or estates with the residuary estate, and maintain the hospital by the proceeds, any surplus to be applied to the benefit of poor sick persons or for other charitable uses. The will was proved on 4 Jan. 1724-5. The required act of parliament was obtained in the same year (11 George I, cap. xii.), and gave power to the executors to set up a monument to Guy in the chapel, which was designed by John Bacon, R.A.

In the centre of the square, which afterwards completed the front of Guy's Hospital, is a bronze statue of Guy in his livery gown, by Scheemakers; on the west side, in basso-relievo, is represented the parable of the Good Samaritan, and on the east Christ healing the impotent man. There are some portraits of Guy at the hospital, mostly posthumous; the only one that has any pretensions to originality is by Vanderbank, dated 1706, reproduced in the ‘Graphic,’ 14 May 1887. He there appears long-faced, with a high forehead, firm lips, and self-possessed, calm, and resolute expression.

[Ballard MSS. xlix. in Bodleian Library, Oxford; Dr. John Wallis's Account of Printing at Oxford, 23 Jan. 1691, in Derham's Philosophical Experiments, &c., of Robert Hooke and others, 1726; Dunton's Life and Errors, 1705, pp. 281, 307; Dunton's Essay on Death-bed Charity, 1728; Guy's Will, three editions in 1725, reprinted by the governors of Guy's, 1732; Maitland's London, 1739, pp. 667-70, the account evidently furnished by Guy's Hospital authorities; Nichols's Lit. Anecd. i. 61, iii. 599, 600; Nichols's Lit. Illustr. iii. 253; Saturday Magazine, 2 Aug. 1834; Charles Knight's Shadows of the Old Booksellers, 1865; Old and New London, vol. vi.; information from Mr. W. Rendle of Forest Hill; Bettany and Wilks's forthcoming Biographical History of Guy's Hospital.]

GUY, WILLIAM AUGUSTUS (1810–1885), statistician, was born in 1810 at Chichester, where his male ancestors for three generations had been medical men. Hayley, in his ‘Life of Romney,’ says of his grandfather, William Guy, that he won Cowper's heart at sight, and that Romney would have chosen, him as a model for a picture of the Saviour. Guy spent his early life with this grandfather and then went to Christ's Hospital, and for five years to Guy's. He won the Fother-gillian medal of the Medical Society of London in 1831 for the best essay on asthma, and afterwards entered at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where, after further study for two years at Heidelberg and Paris, he took his M.B. degree in 1837. In 1838 he was appointed professor of forensic medicine at King's College, London, in 1842 assistant-physician to King's College Hospital, and from 1846 to 1858 he was dean of the medical faculty. He early directed his attention to statistics, and was one of the honorary secretaries of the Statistical Society, from 1843 to 1868. In 1844 he gave important evidence before the Health of Towns Commission on the state of printing offices in London, and the consequent development of pulmonary consumption among printers. He took part in founding the Health of Towns Association, and was incessantly occupied in calling public attention to questions of sanitary reform by investigations (statistical and medical), lectures, and writings. He thus rendered valuable services in connection with the improvement of ventilation, the utilisation of sewage, the health of bakers and soldiers, and hospital mortality.

He edited the ‘Journal of the Statistical Society’ from 1852 to 1856, was vice-president 1869-72, and in 1873-5 he was president of the society. He was Croonian (1861), Lumleian (1868), and Harveian (1875) lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians, and was frequently censor and examiner of the college. In 1878 he was appointed one of the royal commissioners on penal servitude, and on criminal lunatics in 1879. In 1876-7 he was elected to the post of vice-president of the Royal Society.

Guy's ‘Principles of Forensic Medicine,’ first published in 1844, and frequently reedited, is now a standard work, the fourth and later editions having been edited by Dr. David Ferrier. Although often consulted in medico-legal cases he would never give evidence publicly, partly from over-sensitiveness, partly from want of confidence in juries. Guy retired from medical practice for many years before his death, retaining only his insurance work. His sympathies were broad, as were