Joseph Fayrer

Sir Joseph Fayrer, 1st Baronet (6 December 1824 - 21 May 1907) was an English physician noted for his writings on medicine in India. He was born at Plymouth, Devon. After studying medicine at Charing Cross Hospital, London, he was in 1847 appointed medical officer of HMS Victory, and soon afterwards accompanied Ernest Augustus Edgcumbe, 3rd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe on a tour through Europe, in the course of which he saw fighting at Palmero and Rome.

Appointed an assistant surgeon in Bengal in 1850, he went through the Burmese campaign of 1852 and was political assistant and Residency surgeon at Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny. From 1859 to 1872 he was professor of surgery at the Medical College of Calcutta, and when the Prince of Wales made his tour in India he was appointed to accompany him as physician. Returning from India, he acted as president of the Medical Board of the India office from 1874 to 1895, and in 1896 he was created a baronet.

Fayrer, who became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1877, wrote much on subjects connected with the practice of medicine in India, and was especially known for his studies on the poisonous snakes of that country and on the physiological effects produced by their venom (Thanatophidia of India, 1872). In 1900 appeared his Recollections of my Life. He died at Falmouth, Cornwall, in 1907.

Anthropology
He also took keen interest in aspects of anthropology. He invited Thomas Henry Huxley to India for an event but his invitation was declined. June 14, 1866 [To Sir Joseph Fayrer] My dear Fayrer–I lose no time in replying to your second letter, and my first business is to apologise for not having answered the first, but it reached me in the thick of my lectures, and like a great many other things which ought to have been done I put off replying to a more convenient season. I have been terribly hard worked this year, and thought I was going to break down a few weeks ago but luckily I have pulled through.

I heartily wish that there were the smallest chance of my being able to accept your kind invitation and take part in your great scheme at Calcutta. But it is impossible for me to leave England for more than six weeks or two months, and that only in the autumn, a time of year when I imagine Calcutta is not likely to be the scene of anything but cholera patients.

As to your plan itself, I think it a most grand and useful one if it can be properly carried out. But you do things on so grand a scale in India that I suppose all the practical difficulties which suggest themselves to me may be overcome.

It strikes me that it will not do to be content with a single representative of each tribe. At least four or five will be needed to eliminate the chances of accident, and even then much will depend upon the discretion and judgment of the local agent who makes the suggestion. This difficulty, however, applies chiefly if not solely to physical ethnology. To the philologer the opportunities for comparing dialects and checking pronunciation will be splendid, however [few] the individual speakers of each dialect may be. The most difficult task of all will be to prevent the assembled Savans from massacring the "specimens" at the end of the exhibition for the sake of their skulls and pelves!

I am really afraid that my own virtue might yield if so tempted!

Jesting apart, I heartily wish your plans success, and if there are any more definite ways in which I can help, let me know, and I will do my best. You will want, I should think, a physical and a philological committee to organise schemes: (1) for systematic measuring, weighing, and portraiture, with observation and recording of all physical characters; and (2) for uniform registering of sounds by Roman letters and collection of vocabularies and grammatical forms upon an uniform system.

I should advise you to look into the Museum of the Société d'Anthropologie of Paris, and to put yourself in communication with M. Paul Broca, one of its most active members, who has lately been organising a scheme of general anthropological instructions. But don't have anything to do with the quacks who are at the head of the "Anthropological Society" over here. If they catch scent of what you are about they will certainly want to hook on to you.

Once more I wish I had the chance of being able to visit your congress. I have been lecturing on Ethnology this year, and shall be again this year, and I would give a good deal to be able to look at the complex facts of Indian Ethnology with my own eyes.

But as the sage observed, "what's impossible can't be," and what with short holidays–a wife and seven children–and miles of work in arrear, India is an impossibility for me.

You say nothing about yourself, so I trust you are well and hearty, and all your belongings flourishing.–Ever yours faithfully, T. H.Huxley.