W. J. Adie was born at Geelong, Australia, the eldest son of David Adie, and was educated at the Flinders School, Geelong. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, winning the McCosh scholarship and graduating as M.B, B.Ch, in 1911. He then visited Munich and other clinics in Germany and served as a house physician in the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic in London. He joined up on the outbreak of war and was posted to the 1st Northamptonshire Regiment as its medical officer. One of the battalion’s few survivors from the retreat from Mons, he was transferred to the Leicestershire Regiment and later given medical charge of the 7th General Hospital, also acting as consultant to the 2nd Army Centre for head wounds. On demobilisation, he was made medical registrar at Charing Cross Hospital and in due course was appointed both to its staff and to that of the National Hospital. He was also for brief periods physician to the Royal Northern Hospital and the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital and neurologist to the Mount Vernon Hospital, Northwood. Both as a writer on neurological subjects such as narcolepsy, pituitary tumours and disseminated sclerosis, and as a teacher of clinical medicine with remarkable powers of observation, Adie had shown exceptional promise when his life was cut short at the age of forty-eight. He was also a fine linguist. But for all his intellectual capacity, he remained modest and approachable. He married in 1916 Lorraine Bonar of Edinburgh and had a son and a daughter. He died at Golders Green.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1935; B.M.J., 1935]