Descended from a family well known in Bury, Lancashire, as chemical dyers and bleachers, Adam Bealey went up to St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1832. He migrated to Queens’ College in 1835. In the next year, having received his B.A. degree, he returned home to do laboratory work in his father’s business, and several years elapsed before he began his studies at Guy’s and St. George’s Hospitals and the Royal College of Chemistry which enabled him to take his M.D. in 1854.

As a London practitioner, Bealey held appointments at the Borough, Surrey and St. Pancras Dispensaries. In 1868 he succeeded to a practice in Harrogate, where he was influential in founding the Cottage Hospital—later the Harrogate Infirmary—and took a helpful interest in primary education, until his retirement to St. Leonards in 1891. Bealey was a classical scholar, a connoisseur of French literature, and a wide reader in both scientific and theological subjects. He married in 1857, Mary Isabella Bridges, and had three daughters. He died at St. Leonards.

G H Brown

[Presidential Address to R.C.P., 1905, 19; Al.Cantab., i, 201]