Death
Thomas Addison suffered from many episodes of marked depression. It would seem certain that depression contributed to his retirement in 1860. He wrote then to his medical students as follows: "A considerable breakdown in my health has scared me from the anxieties, responsibilities and excitement of my profession; whether temporarily or permanently cannot yet be determined but, whatever may be the issue, be assured that nothing was better calculated to soothe me than the kind interest manifested by the pupils of Guy's Hospital during the many trying years devoted to that institution."
Three months later, on 29 June 1860, he committed suicide. The day after his death the Brighton Herald recorded that:
| “ | "Dr Addison, formerly a physician to Guy's Hospital, committed suicide by jumping down the area (i.e. the space between the front of the house and the street) of 15 Wellington Villas, where he had for some time been residing, under the care of two attendants, having before attempted self-destruction. He was 72 years of age {{sic}}, and laboured under the form of insanity called melancholia, resulting from overwork of the brain. He was walking in the garden with his attendants, when he was summoned in to dinner. He made as if towards the front door, but suddenly threw himself over a dwarf-wall into the area - a distance of nine feet - and, falling on his head, the frontal bone was fractured, and death resulted at one o'clock yesterday morning" | ” |
He was buried in the churchyard of Lanercost Priory. The hospital had a bust made of him, named a hall of the new part of the hospital for him, and perpetuated his memory with a marble wall table in the chapel. Thomas Addison was at Guy's forever.
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