J. G. Porter Phillips, who altered his surname to Porter-Phillips late in life, was born at Darjeeling in India, the son of Robert Phillips. He went to school at Brighton and then attended University College, London, and Guy’s Hospital, where he graduated as M.B, B.S, in 1907. In the same year he was appointed house physician in the Bethlem Royal Hospital, and with this institution he remained connected for the whole of his career, as assistant medical officer from 1908 to 1914 and as physician-superintendent from 1914 till his retirement thirty years later. He supervised the transfer of the Hospital from Lambeth to Beckenham in 1930 and was responsible for many of the improvements in the new buildings. Porter-Phillips, who won the Gaskell gold medal and prize in 1911, was also physician for psychological medicine, and lecturer on the subject, at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. For varying periods he acted as medical officer to King Edward’s Schools at London and Witley, physician to the Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Lambeth, and lecturer on mental pathology at the London School of Medicine for Women. His interests outside medicine were golf, fishing, natural history and art. He married Kathleen Phyllis, daughter of Leader Stevenson, M.D, and had two daughters and a son.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1946; B.M.J., 1946]