170 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



surgeon, " who found it necessary to amputate one of my feet, and a 

 portion of the other." " For months," says one who knew him well. 

 Dr. T. J. W. Burgess, superintendent of the Protestant Asylum for 

 the Insane, Montreal, " the stricken man lay in that mountain cahin, 

 tended only by rough, yet gentle, hands, and there it was that he first 

 had time to think. ' I was born again,' he once said, in speaking of 

 this period of his life, ' it cost me my feet — yet it was worth the 

 price.' " ^ The stumps did not thoroughly heal for more than forty 

 years. The sufferings he endured can be better imagined than described. 

 But never was suffering more heroically borne, and uncomplaining, he 

 suffered in silence. 



12. 



The youth of 16 returned to his Canadian home a man of 21.^ 

 maimed and broken in health, but with a knowledge of nature and of 

 men, a store of experience, such as few men of 21 have ever had. 

 A sum of money left him by his mother enabled him to carry out a 

 plan he had formed of going to college. 



At once he entered upon a medical course at McGill University. 

 Pie graduated in 1862, winning the prize for the best thesis of his 

 year. The tremendous force of will, the dominance of the mental and 

 moral powers over the physical system, which such a university career 

 evinces, showed him to be no common man. 



The prize thesis, entitled " The Correlation of the Vital and Physi- 

 cal Forces," defended before the Medical Faculty of McGill, May 2, 

 1862, was printed in the British American Journal, and in pamphlet 

 form. 



Among his fellow students at McGill may be mentioned Doctor 

 Joseph M. Drake, afterwards professor of physiology at the university; 

 Doctors Wright, of Ottawa, and Phillips, of Brantford. 



His reading was not limited by the curriculum nor the books 

 relating to medical science. 



" Outside of his collegiate course he read with avidity many 

 speculative books, such as the " Origin of Species," Tyndall's " Heat," 

 and " Essays," Buckle's " History," " Essays and Reviews," and much 

 poetry, especially such as seemed to him free and fearless. In this 

 species of literature he soon preferred Shelley, and of his poems, 

 *' Adonais " and " Prometheus " were his favourites. His life for some 

 years was one passionate note of interrogation, an unappeasable hunger 



^ From a paper read at the Annual Meeting- of the American Medico- 

 Psychological Association, held at Montreal, June 1902, and reprihted ir 

 pamphlet form from the published proceedings. 



