W. J. Mickle spent his youth in Canada and graduated as M.B, with a gold medal, at the University of Toronto in 1866, having studied there and at Jefferson College, Philadelphia. He continued his professional training at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, qualifying as M.R.C.S. in 1868, and then associated himself with the study and treatment of mental diseases. He was made assistant physician at the Derby and Warwick County Asylums and deputy superintendent of the Abington Abbey Asylum, Northampton. In 1873, however, he took up the appointment which was to provide his life’s main work, that of medical superintendent of the Grove Hall Asylum, Bow. He also obtained lectureships on mental physiology and mental diseases at the Middlesex and University College Hospitals. He gave the Goulstonian Lectures of 1888 at the Royal College of Physicians. He was a contributor to Hack Tuke’s Dictionary of Psychological Medicine and published researches on the relation of syphilis to insanity. Personally, Mickle was a reserved and solitary figure, devoted to his work and permitting himself few distractions. Retiring some ten years before his death, he lived in Bayswater until, on his health breaking down, he decided to join relatives in Toronto, where he died.

G H Brown

[Presidential Address to R.C.P., 1918, (MS.)]