Volume 1

The healing art, or, Chapters upon medicine, diseases, remedies, and physicians, historical, biographical and descriptive.

Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The healing art, or, Chapters upon medicine, diseases, remedies, and physicians, historical, biographical and descriptive. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    year for life, he certainly made liberal amends for his previous neglect of them. To a young barrister, named Nutley, who had wasted his fortune in riotous living, he is known to have given 500 guineas. Under an assumed name he settled on the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel £50 per annum in per- petuity. He gave the Bishop of Norwich privately 500 guineas to distinbute among the poor Nonjurors ; and to Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, under an assumed name, £300 for the relief of the distressed Scotch Episcopal clergy. To Dr. James Drake, the Tory pamphleteer, who had libelled him un- mercifully, he sent 50 guineas anonymously, when the man feU. into poverty. Obadiah Walker, the Romanist head of Univer- sity College, was wholly supported by him from the time of his dismissal from his office until his death. He who could be capable of generosity so unostentatious cannot properly be called a miser, though circumstances may have impressed upon him too keen a desire of acquisition and an extreme sense of the value of money. The truth seems to be, that he was mean in small things, grumbled at the cost of his daily living, and was eager to cut down his tradesmen's bills. This spirit of parsimony exposed him on one occasion to a sharp rebuff. He was contending with a workman who had been employed to mend the stones before the doctor's house in Bloomsbury Square. Why, you rogue! he exclaimed, do you ask to be paid for such a piece of work ? Why, you have spoiled my pavement, and then covered it over with earth to hide the bad work. Ah, doctor, rejoined the artisan, with a smile of deep meaning, mine is not the only bad work which the earth tides —a retort which so delighted Eadcliffe that he paid the man without further demur. Eadcliffe was a good Jacobite, but I fear he was a bad Christian, if the anecdote preserved by Bishop Kennett be