Physicians and surgeons of the last generation / by a man on the shady side of fifty.

Date:
[between 1860 and 1869]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Physicians and surgeons of the last generation / by a man on the shady side of fifty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ae complaint proved fatal, and young bright was carried to an untimely grave, [lis father never recovered this severe nock. For a time, by a desperate Sffort, he rallied, and devoted himself new to practice, allowing little time ■or recreation or reflection. But the nought of his bereavement, of his ttter loneliness, would intrude and im- rcess itself sadly and ineffaceably on his liind, incapacitating him for professional rnty. In this fashion he lingered for ^me ten years, but soon followed to no tomb his friend Chambers, with Ihom he had so often consulted in pro- fessional practice in the fourteen or ffteen years between 1832 and 1846. irright was, I believe, in easy circum- faances when he commenced his pro- fessional career; but his eminence was rot owing to patronage, nor to the gifts f : fortune, nor to a showy or specious ildress, nor to any singularity of views r: doctrine, but to his sagacity, to his :blid qualities, and to his eminent pro- fsssional attainments. Bright and Chambers had a larger practice among iistinguished barristers than any physi- aans of their time. I attribute this urtly to their eminent merits, partly to iieir intermixture with men intended »r the law, and somewhat also to the aie being the son of a judge, and to lie other being a near relative of a nrrister. During the absence of Chambers and fright from London, on a summer con- tinental tour, I first consulted Marshall -all, who was then living near to me u 14, Manchester Square, a house which 3 had occupied since his removal from ieppel Street, in 1830. His counte- nance was intelligent and pleasing, and 3 was undoubtedly a conscientious and lainstaking man; but it occurred to j-e, on seeing him for the first time, iat, although his face beamed with 3od-nature and benevolence, yet his Lanner was somewhat prim and pro- incial. He asked me, for instance, before said a word to him on my complaint, iy ago, my profession or calling, my our of rising, whether I took much sercise in the open air and of what kind, my hours of breakfast and dinner, and what I chiefly lived on in the way of fish and flesh. These questions were, perhaps, necessary to assist the judg- ment of the practitioner, but they were rather wearisome to a patient who did not distinctly see their precise bearing. When I came to know Marshall Hall better, this primness, not to say priggish- ness of manner, wore off, and he appeared to me what he really was—a conscien- tious, careful, and painstaking physi- cian, accurate in diagnosis, which he had learned by the close study of diseases at the bedside. His first lec- tures, in 1813, were on the subject of diagnosis; and these were afterwards ex- panded into the celebrated work bearing that name, the first edition of which was published by Longman and Co. in 1817. Marshall Hall had few advantages of early education. He was the son of a cotton-spinner at Nottingham, the sixth of eight children, and, at fourteen years of age, was bound apprentice to a chemist at Newark. While in this position, feeling the deficiency of his early educa- tion, he imposed on himself the task of writing Latin exercises, which he regu- larly sent once a week, by a carrier, to be corrected by his friend, the Rev. Robert Almond, then curate of Basford. In October, 1809, when in his nineteenth year, he repaired to Edinburgh, where he became a favourite pupil of Dr. Andrew Fyfe. The professor gave him and another fellow-student leave to at- tend in the dissecting-room, out of the usual routine, at a very early hour, for practical purposes ; and it was by this unusual industry that he acquired that ac- quaintance with anatomy which, to use the language of the son of Dr. Fyfe, “ paved the way for his future re- “ searches.” He spent five years at Edin- burgh, two of which were passed at the Royal Infirmary. It was in Edinburgh, in 1812, he first became acquainted with the late Dr. Wi F. Chambers, of whom I have spoken in a previous part of this paper; who, a prizeman at Trinity Col- lege, Cambridge, in 1810, arrived two years afterwards in the Scottish capital