Patrick Black, second son of Lieut.-Colonel Patrick Black, Bengal Cavalry, of Aberdeen, was a descendant of Sir Patrick Dun, President of the Irish College of Physicians. After leaving Eton, he spent a few months in studying medicine at Paris before going up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1831. His hospital training took place at St. Bartholomew’s, where he became assistant physician in 1842, warden of the College and first administrator of chloroform in 1851, lecturer on medical jurisprudence (1855) and medicine (1861), and full physician in 1860. He was also, at various dates, physician to the Seamen’s Hospital and to Christ’s Hospital, a director of the Clerical, Medical and General Life Assurance Society, and examiner to Oxford University.

At the Royal College of Physicians, he was Censor and Croonian Lecturer (1855) and in 1867 revised the Latin part of the Nomenclature of Diseases. His principal publications were a treatise on Chloroform (1855) and papers on respiration, scurvy and the spleen in 1876. As a lecturer, Black was pedestrian and orthodox. As a physician, he was tolerantly sceptical, with an extreme distrust of drugs. He was a highly competent anaesthetist. He married in 1843 the daughter of William Mark, H.M. Consul at Malaga, by whom he had several children.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1879; St. Bart.'s Hospital Reports, 1879, xv, p. Xxix; D.N.B., v, 112.; Moore, ii, 566; Al.Oxon., I, 116]