This unusual memorial on the wall of St Andrew's Church remembers a little girl aged three who died in Headington on 13 September 1827 and was buried at that church on 18 September. It reads:

GEO^A FRED^CA COLLIER
OBIIT SEP^R 13^TH 1827 ÆTAT. 3

CHANG'D how CHANG'D? YET WHEREFORE CHANG'D IN TORTURE?
THE WORLD EXISTS BY CHANGE AND BUT FOR that
ALL MATTER WOULD TO CHAOS BACK AGAIN
TO FORM A PILLOW FOR A SLEEPING GOD

I. H. S. (Iēsous Hominum Salvator)

HAUD ICTUS SAPIO

Georgiana Frederica Collier was born at 20 Norfolk Street in London and baptised at St Clement Danes Church on 27 June 1824. She was the daughter of the London surgeon George Frederick Collier (who was born in Rugeley, Staffordshire in 1799) and Marian Jones, the second daughter of John Jones, Esq of Skethrog House near Brecon.

Her parents were married at Llansaintfrece Church, Breconshire on 18 October 1820. Their first daughter was named Marian after her mother and their second Georgiana Frederica after her father.

On 15 March 1827, around the time of Georgiana's third birthday, her father was matriculated at the University of Oxford by Magdalen Hall at the age of 26, and presumably the family moved into a house in Headington. (Magdalen Hall was then on the site of Magdalen College's St Swithun's quadrangle, just a one-mile walk away from the first houses of Headington at the top of the hill.) On 13 September that year, barely six months after his matriculation, his daughter Georgiana died.

The following year (December 1828) Georgiana's father used the same words that are on his daughter's memorial (including the line “Haud ictus sapio”) to introduce his dissertation on hydrocephalic fever, which he wrote in Latin for his Doctorate in Medicine at the University of Leiden. He never completed his degree at Oxford.

By 1831 the family had moved to Bohemia House, Turnham Green, Chiswick, Middlesex. Georgiana's father was listed at that address when he was made a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians that year.

Georgiana's mother Marian Collier died at Chiswick on 3 April 1838 at the age of 39. At the time of the 1841 census George Frederick Collier was working as a surgeon and living at Bohemia House, Chiswick with his seven surviving children, namely Marian Collier, Frederick Leonidas Collier, George Bertram Collier, John Jackson Collier, Edwin William Collier, Alfred Henry Collier, and Clara Collier.

On 24 August 1847 at St John the Evangelist Church in Lambeth, Georgiana's father George Frederick Collier married his second wife Mary Ann Stanley and had seven more children (the first born just four months after the marriage): Henry Jephson Collier, Frank Robert Stanley Collier, Nicholas Constantine Collier, Herbert Collier, Herman Felix Collier, Mark Purcell Mayo Collier, and Arthur Collier.

Georgiana's father died at Bohemia House on 23 December 1877.

Books by Georgiana's father

George Frederick Collier was a physician as well as a surgeon, and was a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London. He wrote a number of books, including:

• The pharmacopoeia of the Royal College of Physicians, M.DCCC.IX literally tr., and the chemical decompositions annexed (1821)
• A translation of the new pharmacopoeia of the Royal College of Physicians of London: with notes and criticisms (1837)
• Code for safety; or, The laws of epidemics, embracing causes, effects, and aids preventive and curative (1853)
• Regina v. Palmer, the paradoxology of poisoning, and pudding in a lantern (1856)
• The philosopher's mite to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (1850)
• To the premiers in posse (?) and esse, and the electors of Great Britain (1868).