Born at Forres, Morayshire, the son of Peter Taylor, James Taylor went to school at the local academy. He worked as a bank clerk before deciding cm a medical career. At Edinburgh University he took first a degree in natural science and then, in 1886, the degree of M.B. After holding house appointments at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children and the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, he paid a visit to German neurological and eye clinics. Returning to London, he was given house appointments at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, where he became assistant physician in 1893, later physician, and eventually consulting physician. He also joined the staffs of the Moorfields Eye Hospital and the Queen’s Hospital for Children, Bethnal Green. His chief claim to distinction in neurology was his publication, in 1895, of the first adequate account of subacute combined degeneration of the spinal cord. In 1899 he assisted Sir William Gowers in the preparation of the third edition of his Manual of Nervous Diseases, and six years later produced his own Paralysis and other Nervous Diseases in Early Life. He contributed to the second edition of Allbutt’s System of Medicine (1910). In retirement he published Neurological Fragments (1925) and Selected Writings (1931-32) of Hughlings Jackson. He was created C.B.E. in 1920. A man of tolerance and common sense, Taylor continued the scientific traditions of the neurologists who graced Queen Square at the end of the nineteenth century. He married in 1905 Elizabeth Marian, daughter of Charles E. Cooke, of Weasenham, Norfolk, and had one daughter. He died in London.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1946; B.M.J., 1946; Times, 7 June 1946; Presidential Address to R.C.P., 1947, 10]