Notices of the Life of Professor Wilson, 181 



was informed by two surgeons of the higliest skill, who were con- 

 sulted on my case, that I must choose between death and the 

 sacrifice of a limb, — and that my choice must be promptly made, 

 for my strength was fast sinking under pain, sleeplessness, and 

 exhaustion. I at once agreed to submit to the operation, but 

 asked a week to prepare for it, not with the slightest expectation 

 that my disease would take a favourable turn in the interval, or 

 that the anticipated horrors of the operation would become less 

 appalling by reflection upon them ; but simply because it was so 

 probable that the operation would be followed by a fatal issue, 

 that I wished to prepare for death, and what lies beyond it, whilst 

 my faculties were clear and my emotions were comparatively 

 undisturbed. For I knew well that if the operation was speedily 

 followed by death, 1 should be in a condition, during the interval, 

 in the last degree unfavourable to making preparation for the 

 o;reat chano^e." 



During the interval, he diligently and prayerfully studied the 

 Bible, and at the end of a week the operation was performed. 

 There were no anaesthetics in those days, and the operation was a 

 very painful and somewhat tedious one. Not being gifted with 

 great physical courage, he was one of those to whom cutting, 

 bruising, burning, or any similar physical injury, eren to a small 

 extent, was a source of suffering never willingly endured, and 

 always anticipated with more or less apprehension. He states 

 that he could never forget the black whirlwind of emotion, the 

 horror of great darkness, and the sense of desertion by God and 

 man, bordering almost upon despair, which swept through his 

 mind and overwhelmed his heart. Chloroform would have been 

 the greatest boon to him. From his relations he concealed the 

 impending operation, fearing that the expression of their grief 

 would shake his resolution. They were not aware of what had 

 happened until the surgeons made it known to them. " During 

 the operation," he continues, "in spite of the pain it occasioned, 

 my senses were preternaturally acute ; I watched all that the sur- 

 geons did with fascinated intensity. I still recall with unwelcome 

 vividness the spreading out of the instruments, the twisting of the 

 tourniquet, the first incision, the fingering of the sawed bone, the 

 sponge pressed on the flap, the tying of the blood-vessels, the 

 stitching of the skin, and the bloody dismembered limb lying on 

 the floor." He then dwells on the value of ancesthetics, and con- 



