HORSLEY, SIR VICTOR (1857-1916), English physiolo gist and surgeon, was born in Kensington, London, on April 14, 1857. He studied medicine at University college, London, and, after qualifying in 1880, became house-surgeon to John Marshall. He then became professor-superintendent of cthe Brown Institu tion in the university (1884-90), assistant surgeon at University college hospital (1885), F.R.S. (1886), professor of pathology at University college (1886), surgeon to the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queen square, London (1886) . In the World War he served in the military hospitals in France, Egypt and Mesopotamia. He put up a strong fight for better ar rangements in the hospitals in the eastern theatre of war, and died at Amarah of heat-stroke on July 16, 1916.
Few men worked harder than Horsley in the two departments of surgery and physiology, but he had many outside interests. He was a passionate reformer, and a leader in the campaign against intemperance. His famous Alcohol and the Human Body (1907) was written in collaboration with Dr. Mary Sturge.
As a surgeon his most original work was done at Queen square. There he conducted successfully the first operation (June g, 1887) for the removal of a tumour from the spinal cord; the paper on cerebral surgery read before the meeting of the British Medical Association at Toronto (1906) is one of the most impor tant of his many writings. Before he went to the Queen square hospital he had made important researches in the localization of function in the brain and spinal cord in conjunction with Sir E. Sharpley Schafer, Sir Felix Semon and others. Other subjects of his investigations at the Brown Institution were the action of the thyroid gland and protective treatment against rabies, and he was secretary of the commission appointed by the Local Govern ment Board in 1886 to study the adoption of the Pasteur treat ment.
See Stephen Paget, Sir Victor Horsley, a study of his Life and Writ ings (1919).