Abstract
The death of Philip Bruce White on 19 March 1949 brought to a premature close the career of an investigator of outstanding ability and a man of intriguing personality. By all bacteriologists, both of the present and future generations, his name will be linked with that of an important group of organisms, the
Salmonella
, but to those who worked alongside him it will also recall the memory of a warm-hearted colleague whose unconventional gaiety leavened the austerities of life in a research community. Bruce White, as he was invariably called by his workaday associates, was a scion of a very old and distinguished Scottish family, from which he derived a quiet but deep pride of race. Close family connexions included Sir Robert Philip, the eminent Professor of Tuberculosis in Edinburgh, and Professor J. C. Philip, the physical chemist who was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Through his paternal grandmother he traced direct descent from James Chalmers, founder of the
Aberdeen Journa
l, and James Bentley, Professor of Oriental Languages at Aberdeen University, who was a grand-nephew of Richard Bentley, the famous Master of Trinity, Cambridge. The Bentley connexion was always referred to in the family as the ‘English taint’, a phrase which Bruce White occasionally adapted to other uses with impish glee. His grandfather, Adam White, was a missionary in India who died of cholera at Purandur in the Bombay Presidency. There is no direct evidence that this circumstance influenced Bruce White’s choice of the cholera vibrio as a subject for investigation in later years, but his romantic temperament was undoubtedly conscious of the poetic justice of the choice and he was extremely gratified when a long-cherished desire to study epidemic cholera in India was fulfilled a few years before his death.