Charles Donald O'Malley. 1 April 1907-7 April 1970.

It is with great regret that we report the sudden death from coronary heart disease on 7 April 1970 of Professor Charles Donald O'Malley, M.A., Ph.D., the distinguished medical historian of the University of California at Los Angeles, the leading authority on Renaissance anatomy and especially on the life and work of Andreas Vesalius. Charles Donald O'Malley was born at Alameda, California on 1 April 1907, the son of James and Isabel (n6e Ten Eyck), and was educated at Stanford University, where he joined the teaching staff as a historian in 1946. He had already published his first book in 1942 on Jacopo Aconcio (1492-1565) and his abiding interest in Vesalius had produced his first paper, 'Vesalius as a clinician', published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine in 1944. This was the first fruit of a long collaboration with J. B. de C. M. Saunders, Professor of Anatomy at Berkeley, from which sprang the two well-known volumes on The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius (1950) and Leonardo da Vinci on the Human Body (1952). Before embarking on these works, O'Malley spent a considerable period on anatomical studies in the dissecting room, an experience which enabled him to appreciate more intimately the problems which had beset the anatomists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At Stanford he had the advantage of researching in the contemporary texts contained in the Lane Medical Library, of which he was for a time Director, and which had been enriched by the acquisition of the late Karl Sudhoff's Library. When he accepted the invitation of Professor Magoun in 1958 to go to his department of anatomy in the University of California at Los Angeles as Visiting Professor in the History of Medicine, O'Malley had already published more than twenty papers directly or indirectly related to the life and work of Vesalius and was becoming widely known as the leading authority on his subject. In the following year he was given a permanent appointment at Los Angeles as Professor of Medical History, at first in the important and rapidly expanding department ofanatomy and then a few years later as head ofan independent Department of Medical History located in ample accommodation in the new Medical Center. Despite the heavy demands on his time made by the task of developing a new department, giving and organizing courses of lectures for medical students, initiating and supervising the work of graduate students, and rapidly building up a fine collection of early medical texts, O'Malley continued his own researches steadfastly. In 1959 there was published in London the splendid facsimile edition of the Thomas Geminus version (1553) of the Fabrica with a substantial introduction embodying a great deal of original research. In 1961 appeared two more volumes, one being a facsimile of the first English book on anatomy by David Edwardes (1532), with a long introduction written jointly with Professor K. F. Russell, and the other an annotated English translation of William Harvey's manuscript Lectures on the Whole ofAnatomy, edited in collaboration with F. N. L. Poynter and K. F. Russell.