CHAPTER X. 



WILLIAM GILBERD (or Gilbert, as the name is more 

 commonly written) was born in the year 1540, in Holy 

 Trinity Parish in the town of Colchester, England. 1 He 

 came of excellent family, and was the eldest of the five 

 sons of Jerome Gilbert, at one time town recorder. Of his 

 individual history there is but scant record. He was a 

 physician, but the great work which has insured his im- 

 mortality has no necessary relation to the healing art. No 

 important discovery in medicine is known to be his, and 

 he appears therein only as a teacher and an expounder. 

 And this is the more remarkable, since, in dealing with a 

 different branch of science, he displays not only a marvel- 

 ous originality of thought, but intolerance of accepted 

 opinion to a degree which ordinarily leads most men to 

 revolutionary extremes in any field of action in which they 

 may be placed. 



Something of the difficulty which is encountered in re- 

 conciling the dual intellectual lives of Shakespeare the 

 poet and Shakespeare the player, of Bacon the philosopher 

 and Bacon the advocate, is again met when those of Gil- 

 bert the physician and Gilbert the discoverer are con- 

 trasted. We find, on the one hand, the hard-working 

 London doctor, renouncing matrimony through simple de- 

 votion to his art, and year in and year out teaching a little 

 band of students at his house hard by St. Paul's, until the 



Cooper: Athenae Cantabrigiensis, Cambridge, 1858. This contains a 

 very full list of works in which reference to Gilbert is made. Of the 

 older biographies of him, that which is especially full appears in Bio- 

 graphica Britannia, London, 1757. Among later memoirs may be noted 

 one by Prof. S. P. Thompson, London, 1891, and another by Mr. Con- 

 rad W. Cooke, London, 1890. 



(258) 



