16 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



aged to add the human touch without which history remains hope- 

 lessly dull. He thus illustrated his own sensitiveness to the essen- 

 tial if elusive values without which our life has no savor and 

 hardly deserves to be recorded. 



He was especially sensitive to music: witness his many refer- 

 ences to it. These references were of necessity very brief, but I 

 shall expand two of them in order to bring forth their rich im- 

 plications. 



I have the reputation of being a hard worker and among the 

 physicians listening to me to-day are perhaps many who work as 

 hard as I do, or harder still; yet, as compared with the famous 

 Dutch physician, Hermann Boerhaave, we are but self-indulging 

 weaklings. According to his early biographer, William Burton, 



The mornings and evenings he devoted to study, the intermediate 

 part of the day to domestic and public affairs. He used to rise 

 during summer at four in the morning, and at five in the winter, 

 even in his later years; ten was his usual bed time. In severest win- 

 ters he had neither fire nor stove in his study, where he passed the 

 three or four first hours of the morning: his application to study 

 was greater in the last ten years of his life, than in any space of 

 equal duration from the year 1700. When business was over, he 

 took the exercise of riding or walking, and when weary revived 

 himself with music, his most delightful entertainment; being not 

 only a good performer on several instruments, particularly the 

 lute, which he accompanied also with his voice, but a good 

 theorist likewise in the science, having read the ancient and best 

 modern authors on the subject, as appears by the lectures he 

 gave on sound and hearing; and during the winter he had once 

 a week a concert at his own house, to which by turns were in- 

 vited some select acquaintance of both sexes, and likewise pa- 

 tients of distinction from other countries. 



His teaching should presumably be understood as a part of 

 those "domestic and public affairs" which occupied the inter- 

 mediate part of his day. Perhaps he thought, as many scholars do, 

 that teaching was not real work but rather an interruption of it. 



