Benjamin Ward Richardson - Epilogue

Epilogue

Richardson died at 25 Manchester Square on 21 November 1896, and his body was cremated at Brookwood, Surrey. He married, on 21 February, Mary J. Smith of Mortlake, by whom he left two surviving sons and one daughter.

Richardson was a sanitary reformer, who busied himself with many of the smaller details of domestic sanitation which tend, in the aggregate, to prolong the average life in each generation. He spent many years in attempts to relieve pain among men by discovering and adapting substances capable of producing general or local anaesthesia, and among animals by more humane methods of slaughter. He brought into use, no less than fourteen anaesthetics, of which methylene bichloride is the best known, and he invented the first double-valved mouthpiece for use in the administration of chloroform. He also produced local insensibility by freezing the part with an ether spray, and he gave animals euthanasia by means of a lethal chamber.

Richardson was an ardent and determined champion of total abstinence, for he held that alcohol was so powerful a drug that it should only be used by skilled hands in the greatest emergencies. He was also one of the earliest advocates of bicycling; he wrote 'Cycling as an Intellectual Pursuit' for Longman's Magazine in 1883. In 1863, he made known the peculiar properties of amyl nitrite, a drug which was largely used in the treatment of breast-pang (angina pectoris), and he introduced the bromides of quinine, iron and strychnia, ozonized ether, styptic and iodized colloid, peroxide of hydrogen, and ethylate of soda, substances which were soon largely used by the medical profession.

Richardson was one of the most prolific writers of his generation. He wrote biographies, plays, poems, and songs, in addition to his more strictly scientific work. He wrote the Asclepiad, a series of original researches in the science, art, and literature of medicine. A single volume was issued in 1861, after which it appeared quarterly from 1884 to 1895. He was the originator and the editor of the Journal of Public Health and Sanitary Review (1855). He contributed many articles, signed and unsigned, to The Lancet, The Medical Times and The Gazette.