Mr STEPHEN HALES
The Hales family are one of the oldest families
of East Kent and are remembered now in a large housing
estate near St. Stephens Church, Canterbury as Hales
Place. One branch of the family lived at Bekesbourne
of which the most famous is Stephen Hales (1677-1761).
He was educated at Corpus Christi, Cambridge (the same
college as Christopher Marlowe) and then moved to
Oxford where he obtained a Doctorate and took up
various livings at Teddington in Middlesex, Porlock in
Somerset and Farringdon. It is recorded that as a
parson he made ‘female parishioners do public penance
for their irregular behaviour’. But it is as a physio-
logist and inventor that he is best remembered. He
became an F.R.S. in 1718 and in 1750 was one of the
only 8 foreign members of the French Academy. In his
botanical studies he wrote a long paper on the loss of
water which plants suffer by evaporation and the means
by which roots make good their loss; he also was re-
sponsible for papers on measuring the amount of blood
pressure, the nature of secretion and carried out ex-
periments on the removal of stones in the bladder. A
contemporary medical historian has described him as
second only in importance to William Hervey who dis-
covered the circulation of the blood and 'he had a
sound conception of the living organism as a self-
regulating machine‘. He was also responsible for in-
venting artificial ventilators and his method of
injecting air with bellows he applied to prison ships
and granaries. He wrote during the Seven Years war
that he ho ed_ that no one would inform against him
for corresgbnding with the enemy. He also invented a
method for distilling sea water and an apparatus for
measuring the fathoms in the water. He was a teeto-
taller and wrote a treatise called 'a friendly admoni-
tion to the drinkers of brandy‘ which as late as 1807
was being published by the S.P.C.K. in a 6th edition.
He is buried at Teddington and there is a monument to
h m in Westminster Abbey put up by the Princess of
wales as he had for a short time been tu or to George
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