Walter Pagel (12 November 1898 to 25 March 1983).

Walter Pagel was born in Berlin, the son of Julius Leopold Pagel, the well-known medical historian, who contributed numerous articles to August Hirsch's Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden A erzte and who put the study of medieval anatomy and surgery on the map. After a classical philological education, Walter Pagel graduated in medicine in Berlin in 1922. After posts in the Pathology Department of Ttubingen University, the Robert Koch Institute, and the Municipal Tuberculosis Hospital in Berlin, he gained a higher doctorate in 1930 at Heidelberg University with a paper on 'Virchow and the principles of medicine during the nineteenth century'. In the same year, his first book on Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644) was published. In 1920, he married Dr Magda Koll, who was to remain dedicated to looking after his well-being and the furtherance of his work to the end of her life in 1980. They had one son, Bernard. In 1933, they emigrated, first to Paris and the Calmette Laboratory at the Pasteur Institute, and then to Cambridge, where Walter Pagel became Pathologist at the Papworth Village Settlement. In 1933, he was one of the founders of the Cambridge History of Science Lectures Committee, and acted as its Honorary Secretary until 1939. He published with Joseph Needham a selection from these lectures entitled Background to modern science, which included Lord Rutherford, Sir Arthur Eddington, and J. B. S. Haldane among its contributors. From 1939 to 1956, he was Consultant Pathologist to the Central Middlesex Hospital, Harlesden, and, from 1956 to 1967, to the Clare Hall Hospital, Barnet, Herts. His literary and historical work, however, did not start with his retirement in 1967 but had been a continuous activity since his first article on hydranencephaly in 1922. His standard work on Pulmonary tuberculosis (1939), written originally with G. G. Keyne and L. O'Shaughnessy, has gone into several editions. Indeed, he was acquainted with tuberculosis from personal experience, and, as a result, a delicate state of health constantly dogged his life and restricted his movements considerably but never dampened his exuberant high spirits and sparkling wit nor ever prevented him from continuing with his monumental work. In 1935, his 'Religious motives in medical biology of the seventeenth century', though published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, in length really constituted a book. In 1958, his English book on Paracelsus, Paracelsus. An introduction to philosophical medicine in the era of the Renaissance, was published. Another aspect is treated in his German work (1962) on the same subject, Das medizinische Weltbild des Paracelsus. Seine Zusammenhange mit Neuplatonismus und Gnosis. In 1967, he published William Harvey's biological ideas, presenting Harvey not just as a modern innovator but as a child of his own time. 'William Harvey revisited' in two issues of the annual journal History of Science, 1969/70, nos 8 and 9, and his New light on Harvey of 1976 deal with Harvey's Aristotelianism and with controversies regarding Harvey's discoveries. Even in 1982, Walter Pagel published not only a second revised and enlarged edition of the English Paracelsus book, but also a new book, J. B. Van Helmont, reformer ofscience and medicine, dealing with Helmont's biological ideas, their sources, background, and