James Lindsay was born at Fintona, County Tyrone, the son of David Lindsay, a business man. He was educated in Belfast, at the Royal Academical Institution, at the Methodist College and at Queen’s College, where he was a distinguished classical graduate before taking up the study of medicine. He took the degrees of M.D, M.Ch, in 1882, and completed his training at the London Hospital and in Paris and Vienna. He then settled in Belfast, becoming assistant physician to the Royal Victoria Hospital, which he served for the greater part of his career, as full physician after 1888 and chairman of the board of management from 1919 to 1927, becoming consulting physician in 1921. From 1899 to 1924 he also occupied the chair of medicine in Queen’s University. Lindsay helped to found the Belfast Dental School and the New Maternity Hospital. He examined for the Royal University, Trinity College, Dublin, and Manchester and Leeds Universities, and in 1909 delivered the Bradshaw Lecture before the Royal College of Physicians. Chest diseases were the principal subject of his writings but he published a collection of his Medical Axioms, Aphorisms, and Clinical Memoranda in 1923. Gifted with a mind at once scholarly and judicial, Lindsay believed that the teacher’s function was to instruct the student how to learn and how to think. He was prominent in the cultural life of Belfast and found his recreation in music, golf, mountaineering and watching cricket. He died, a bachelor, in Belfast.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1931; B.M.J., 1931; Belfast Telegraph, 14 Dec. 1931]