Eustace Smith was born in London, the third son of Rev. John Henry Smith, vicar of Milverton, Warwickshire. He went to school at Leamington College and studied medicine at University College, London, and at Paris. His first few years after qualifying in 1858 were spent in general practice, but on being appointed, through Jenner’s influence, physician to the Duke of Brabant, afterwards Leopold II, king of the Belgians, he travelled in the East with his patron, who created him a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold. On his return, Smith started to practise as a consultant in London. His first appointments were at the North-West London Free Dispensary for Sick Children and the Metropolitan Dispensary, but in 1870 he was elected to the staff of the East London Hospital for Children, Shadwell, and, a year later, to the City of London Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. With the former, he remained in close and honoured association for the remainder of his long and incessantly active life. A specialist in children’s diseases, he wrote, among others, two popular books entitled The Wasting Diseases of Infants and Children (1868) and A Practical Treatise on Disease in Children (1884), and contributed to Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine and Allbutt’s System of Medicine. He was a man of abounding vitality, unspoilt by success and loved by a large circle of friends. Although he remained in busy practice to the end, he was well read in English and French literature, especially in the Elizabethan dramatists, and was a fine water-colour painter. He married in 1875 Katharine Isabella Peace, by whom he had a son and a daughter.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1914; B.M.J., 1914; Plarr, ii, 310]