Charles Edward Beevor

Charles Edward Beevor (Avatar)

1854-1908

Vol IV

Pg 325

Charles Edward Beevor

1854-1908

Vol IV

Pg 325

b.12 June 1854 d.5 December 1908

MD Lond MRCS LSA FRCP(1888)

C. E. Beevor was born in London, the eldest son of Charles Beevor, F.R.C.S, and Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Burrell. He was educated at Blackheath Proprietary School and University College, London, qualifying in 1878. After holding house appointments at University College Hospital and the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, he studied at Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin and Paris, his teachers including Weigert, Cohnheim and Erb. He returned in 1883 to take up the appointment of assistant physician at Queen Square. Two years later he was elected assistant physician to the Great Northern Central Hospital, and both Hospitals in due course appointed him to the office of physician. Devoting himself mainly to neurology, he worked with Victor Horsley for four years on problems of cerebral localisation, and the publication of their results in 1887-90 established Beevor as one of the foremost living neurologists. He reverted to this subject in his Croonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians in 1907. He published a valuable Handbook on Diseases of the Nervous System in 1898 and gave the Lettsomian Lectures before the Medical Society of London in 1907 on the diagnosis and localisation of cerebral tumours.

But his most important research, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of 1908, was embodied in his description of the arterial supply to all parts of the brain, which filled a gap in contemporary anatomical knowledge. He lectured in America in 1908, receiving an enthusiastic welcome from his audiences. Beevor was a man of exceptional modesty and simplicity of character, self-critical to the highest degree, and gifted musically and artistically. He married in 1882 Blanche Adine, daughter of Dr. Thomas Robinson Leadam, and had one son and one daughter. He died at Wimpole Street, London.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1908; B.M.J., 1908; D.N.B., 2nd Suppl., I, 126]