the leading operator in London. He was elected as president for two years of the Pathological Society of London in 1859. He was elected to the council of the College of Surgeons in 1861, examiner in 1867, and was president of the college in 1870. As professor of human anatomy and surgery he delivered two courses of lectures before the College of Surgeons in 1864 and 1865, which were afterwards published. He was president of the British Medical Association in 1873. In 1875, he received the honorary degree of LL.D. from Edinburgh University. He resigned the professorship of surgery at King's College in 1870, but until his death was clinical professor of surgery and senior surgeon to King's College Hospital. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society. He was created a baronet on 23 January 1866, an honour which led to his receiving a presentation from three hundred old pupils, consisting of a silver dessert service worth £400, at the annual dinner of old King's College men on 21 June 1866. He died in London after an exhausting illness, of Bright's disease, on 10 February 1877, and was buried at West Linton, Peeblesshire, where his wife had been buried in 1860. A portrait of Fergusson by Lehmann, painted by subscription, was presented to the London College of Surgeons in 1874, and a replica is in the Edinburgh College of Surgeons. Assessment Fergusson's reputation is that of a brilliant operator and a great "conservative" surgeon. The term conservative surgery, first applied by Fergusson in 1852 to operations for the preservation of parts of the body which would otherwise have been sacrificed, does not denote merely operations which he originated or improved, for James Syme had already been very successful in this line of procedure. But Fergusson extended the principle from the operation of excision of the elbow joint to many others. No portion of the body which could be usefully preserved was too small for him to make efforts to save. Among operations with which his name is specially identified are those for harelip and cleft palate, and operations on the jaws, the excision of joints, notably the hip, knee, and elbow, lithotomy and lithotrity, and amputations of limbs. His skill in dissection, and his careful study of the actions of the muscles which he had to cut through, were of essential importance to his success. In his lectures