SIR THOMAS LAUDER BRUNTON. 831 



was accompanied by a wine so carefully selected that it gave zest to 

 the food, while the food appeared to give additional flavour to the wine. 



' This dinner was a revelation to me; it not only showed me that 

 cookery might rank as one of the fine arts, but taught me that it might 

 be a powerful moral agent. I went to the dinner exhausted with 

 overwork, irritable in temper, and believing that Citj- companies were 

 wasteful bodies, who squandered mone}' that might be employed for 

 useful purposes, and that they should be abolished; I came away 

 feeling strong and well, with an angelic temper, and firmly convinced 

 that City companies had been established for the express purpose of 

 giving dinners, and ought on no account to be interfered with. Nor 

 was the good thus effected of a transitory nature; the irritability of 

 temper, which had disappeared in the course of dinner, did not return ; 

 and the morning afterwards, instead of awaking with headache and 

 depression, I awoke strong, well, and ready for work, and remained 

 so for a considerable length of time. Nor do I think that mine is a 

 solitary case. A succession of heavy dinners is, no doubt, injurious; 

 but when the organism is exhausted, a good dinner, with abundance 

 of wine, is sometimes of the greatest possible use. But there is one 

 condition which must not be neglected, or otherwise the consequences 

 will be anything but satisfactory ; the dinner must be well cooked, and 

 the wines must be thoroughly good. 



' It is, as I have said, only occasionally that one meets with real high 

 artistic cookery. But, even in the courses of an ordinary dinner, an 

 order is adopted which is thoroughly physiological, and which shows 

 that, whatever men may be in other things, they are not "mostly 

 fools" in regard to the plan of their meals.' " 



The above contains so much truth, and throws so much light on 

 Brunton, his life work, and his brilliant success as a consultant, that 

 no abstract would take its place. 



He served for a year as resident in hospital, and then spent about 

 two years in laboratory work in Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, and 

 Leipsic. In the latter place he was busy on the action of nitrites, and 

 introduced amyl nitrite as a remedy for angina, thus, according to 

 Mitchell Bruce, being " the first to employ a remedy in disease because 

 its pathological action was to act in an opposite manner to the patho- 

 logical condition which he had discovered in the disease — angina 

 pectoris — vis., rise in blood pressure." Rise in the general blood 

 pressure is by no means invariable in angina — but let that pass. 



He then, like many another canny Scot, settled in London, becoming 

 casualty physician and lecturer on Materia Medica at Bartholomew's 



