Vivian Poore was born at Andover, the tenth child of Commander John Poore, R.N, and his wife Martha Midlane. He was educated at the Royal Naval School at New Cross and apprenticed to a doctor at Broughton near Winchester. He was a student at University College, London, and, after qualifying in 1866, acted as surgeon aboard the Great Eastern on her cable-laying voyage across the Atlantic. He won the Atkinson-Morley surgical scholarship in 1867 and graduated in 1868. In 1870 and 1871 he travelled with Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, as his medical attendant, and in 1872 took medical charge of the Prince of Wales during his convalescence, after typhoid fever, in the south of France. In this year he began to lecture at Charing Cross Hospital on medical jurisprudence. In 1876 he was elected assistant physician to University College Hospital, where seven years later he became full physician. He was professor of medical jurisprudence at University College from 1879 to 1900 and professor of medicine from 1900 until his retirement in 1903. Poore also served on the staff of the Royal Hospital for Women and Children. He was a Censor of the Royal College of Physicians, where he delivered the Bradshaw Lecture in 1881 and the Harveian Oration and Milroy Lectures in 1899.

Poore was a man of great versatility, interested in the possibilities of electricity as a therapeutic agent, an expert laryngologist, and an original and attractive lecturer. To the public he was known as a keen sanitarian with highly individual views. He advocated, in the countryside, the use of every particle of sewage and organic waste in fields and gardens, and was proud to point out the admirable results so obtained in his own garden at Andover. He was a strong opponent of water-borne sewage and of high buildings in town communities. In 1891 he acted as general secretary of the Sanitary Congress. He was a close friend of Marcus Beck, F.R.C.S, with whom he shared a house from their student days until Beck’s death in 1893. Poore, who was unmarried, died at Andover.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1904; B.M.J., 1904; D.N.B., 2nd Suppl, iii, 124]