Historical note on the untimely passing of George Ralph Mines

George Ralph Mines passed away at the age of 28. He was found unresponsive in his lab on the evening of 7 November 1914, and died in hospital later that very night, leaving behind his wife, two young children, and a third child in utero. A newspaper article published immediately following his death attributed his demise to ‘a series of experiments on respiration Saturday afternoon, using himself as a subject’ (Anon, 1914). The inscription on Mines's gravestone in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal states ‘Died suddenly as the result of a laboratory experiment.’ In a 1983 Scientific American article (Winfree, 1983), Winfree attributed Mines's death to the self‐induction of fibrillation, extending the experiments he had carried out in rabbits, ‘When Mines decided it was time to begin work with human beings, he chose the most readily available experimental subject: himself.’ This account of death due to self‐experimentation has been repeated in several other places (DeSilva, 1997; Altman, 1998; Acierno & Worrell, 2001).

Winfree's article stimulated our curiosity at McGill. Given Mines's brilliance and his familiarity with experimentally induced fibrillation, it seems implausible that his death was due to self‐experimentation that went horribly wrong. Winfree's proposed mechanism of death, induction of fibrillation, appears to be inconsistent with the several hours that elapsed between Mines being found in his laboratory and death later that same day in the hospital. In the 1980s, the late Professor F. C. MacIntosh, ex‐Chair of the Department of Physiology at McGill University, carried out an extensive investigation concerning Mines's life and death. Documents that he assembled are now available in the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University (MacIntosh, 1985). None of these documents provides an unimpeachable recounting of the cause of death. However, acting on a hunch, MacIntosh did find an unpublished memoir written by V. H. Mottram that was provided by his sons, Martin Mottram and Roy F. Mottram (a former Professor of Physiology at University College, Cardiff). V. H. Mottram was Mines's assistant who had followed him to Montreal from Cambridge. V. H. Mottram's memoir (Mottram, n.d.) states:

That evening I was rung up by the night watchman from the physiology department to come at once. There had been an accident. I went and found a group of medical men surrounding a supine Mines, unconscious but breathing stertorously. He had been found joined up with a pump, which appeared to blow morphia into a vein. (As a matter of fact, the apparatus was so wrongly set up that it would blow air into the circulatory system, and this it had done.) His skin around the chest was bloated with air. There was a letter for me from Mines, which apologized for the trouble he was causing us. [This letter has never been found.] Clearly he had tried to commit suicide by blowing morphia into his system, and so far had failed.

This account is consistent with the autopsy report that is also in the McGill archives. Although the documentation does not provide a motive for suicide, we believe suicide is the most plausible hypothesis for Mines's death.

Figure 1. George Ralph Mines .

Reproduced by permission of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University (MacIntosh, 1985).

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