The son of Thomas Salter. F.R.C.S, of Poole, Henry Salter entered King’s College, London, in 1844. He had already amassed sufficient medical knowledge to be able to win, while still an arts student, a prize for an essay on heart disease, and when, having graduated as B.A. in 1846, he joined the medical department, he won a scholarship in his first year and several prizes afterwards. In 1849 he obtained the first of a number of minor appointments at King’s College, and two years later he established himself in practice and became physician to the Carey Street Dispensary. At King’s College, he assisted R. B. Todd in editing the last two volumes of his Cyclopaedia, to which he also contributed original articles on the pancreas and the tongue; and he helped in the completion of Todd and Bowman’s Physiological Anatomy.

Having failed to succeed Todd in the chair of physiology, Salter transferred his allegiance to Charing Cross Hospital. There he was lecturer on physiology from 1854 to 1864 and subsequently held the lectureship on medicine. He was created assistant physician in 1855 and full physician in 1866. It was during this period that Salter, himself a sufferer from asthma, produced his work on Asthma: its Pathology and Treatment (1860) which was regarded as the best authority on this complaint. Both as a teacher and as a practitioner, he was painstaking, energetic and popular.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1871; B.M.J., 1871; Medical Times and Gazette, 1871]