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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



wick. The governors of the university insisted on a retraction. 

 To Andala's recantation Boerhaave replied with fine courtesy 

 that the most agreeable satisfaction he could receive was that so 

 eminent a divine should have no more trouble on his account. 



Boerhaave was through life cheerful and desirous of promoting 

 mirth by a facetious and humorous conversation. He was never 

 soured by calumny and detraction, nor ever thought it necessary 

 to confute them, " for they are sparks/' he said, " which if you do 

 not blow them will go out of themselves." 



In 1728 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of 

 Sciences in Paris, and in 1730 a member of the Royal Society. 



He accumulated an immense fortune, estimated by some at two 

 millions of florins, and yet through life no one appealed in vain 

 to his generosity. " The poor," he said, " were his best patients, 

 for God paid for them." 



About the middle of the year 1737 he began to suffer from car- 

 diac disturbances, from dyspnoea, and from dropsy. If for a mo- 

 ment he fell asleep, the respi- 

 ration was interrupted, and 

 rest was prevented by a ter- 

 rible sensation as of stran- 

 gling. Yet in a letter he 

 writes, " I have lived to up- 

 ward of sixty-eight years, 

 and always cheerful." 



In the library of the Fac- 

 ulty of Medicine in Paris 

 there were found in 1877 

 ninety letters from Boer- 

 haave to his friend Baron 

 Bassand, physician to the 

 Duke of Lorraine, afterward 

 the Emperor Francis I. In 

 one of these, written two 

 weeks before his death, and 

 intended for private eyes 

 only, he says : " My malady 

 gathers in force. The cardiac oppression due to polypi is con- 

 stant, and of the last degree of cruelty. God wishes it thus. His 

 perfect and sovereign will be glorified by the submission of his 

 creature, who loves and adores only the infinitude of the eternal." * 

 He died on the 27th of September, 1738. His monument in the 

 St. Peter Church, where his body was interred, bears the inscrip- 

 tion " Salutifero Boerhaavii Genio." 



Article by Chireau, L' Union Medicale, 1877, p. 584. 



