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THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, li 



THE PHYSrC OF OUR FATHERS. 



Vita Medica ; C/tafifers of Medical Life and Work. By 

 Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S. 

 Pp. XVI + 496. (London: Longmans and Co, 1897.) 



THIS work, Mr. Bertram Richardson tells us, was 

 finished by his father on Wednesday, November 

 iS, 1895, just before eight o'clock in the evening. At ten 

 he was seized with the illness which ended fatally on 

 Saturday morning, November 21. Thus a pathetic in- 

 terest attaches to these last words of a singularly 

 mteresting and gifted man. Not a few errors in the text, 

 such as the misspelling of proper names, and so forth, 

 nre due no doubt to the want of the author's revision. 



The work may be roughly divided into the biographical 

 part, and a second part in which the author, as if with a 

 prescience of death, tells us of the ideas which had occu- 

 pied his thoughts in his later years. We trust that we may 

 be forgiven for saying that the former part is by far the 

 more interesting. If Sir Benjamin's style occasionally 

 offend the purist, he nevertheless writes in a vigorous, 

 graphic, and even picturesque fashion, which is far better 

 than mere purity. Although no one would have been more 

 reluctant than the author himself to have his style com- 

 pared to that of so splendid and accomplished a master 

 of prose as Mr. Ruskin, yet we admit that on reading 

 the first part of this book we were reminded of the 

 charming " Praeterita," in its winning egotism without 

 self-conceit, its happy delineation of character, and 

 its broad humanity. We were greedy of more, and 

 confess to a disappointment when other matters, which 

 the author no doubt regarded as more important, cut 

 short the personal narrative. Not only so, but the narra- 

 tive itself is diversified by reflections always shrewd and 

 kmdly, often acute and original. The admirable por- 

 traits of those most interesting of men the old-fashioned 

 country practitioners of medicine — such as Dudley 

 Hudson and Willis — are excellent ; in these pages the 

 abler sort of country doctor, with his rugged kindliness, 

 his curious stores of ill-digested learning, his flashes of 

 Iiumorous insight, his devotion to his calling, and his 

 readiness of resource in emergencies, is described to 

 the life. The modern practitioner, however, has some 

 -;rasp of principles, whereas his predecessor, for the 

 most part, hated ideas ; if the modern doctor be 

 inferior to his predecessor in mother wit, less curious 

 in his mental furniture, and wanting in the vigorous 

 eccentricity of manner and thought which made 

 his predecessor entertaining as a character, yet his 

 education in scientific methods makes him a far more 

 enlightened practitioner of a very abstruse and com- 

 plicated art. We insist on this distinction between the 

 scientific physician and the merely practical doctor, 

 because we think Sir Benjamin Richardson, in his advo- 

 cacy of the old system of apprenticeship, which no doubt 

 taught well the arts of managing men and horses and of 

 smelling out drugs in the dark of the night, left out of 

 view that cultivation in the broader principles of medicine 

 as a science which nowadays mark the modern practi- 

 tioner even in country places. For lack of a greater 

 breadth of mental training the Dudley Hudsons, the 



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Willises, and the rest, keenly as they loved curious detail, 

 gained no wide leputation. Moreover, but few appren- 

 tices had remarkable men for their teachers; "first 

 catch your despot." The men who stimulated and in- 

 structed the young Richardson were singularly able men ; 

 too many medical apprentices fell under the guidance 

 of masters whose endowments, natural or acquired, were 

 often little above those of the contemporary cow doctor. 



Many points of more than local interest are touched 

 upon in the course of the biographical sketch. Richardson 

 emphasises the part taken by Perry of Glasgow in making 

 known in Great Britain the distinction between enteric 

 and typhoid fevers. Dr. .A.. P. Stewart, a pupil of Perry, 

 helped to make popular the distinction so clearly taught 

 by his master. The author also gives a very graphic 

 account of the first operation under anaesthetics in 

 Glasgow, by Andrew Buchanan. 



Of that remarkable little town Saffron W^alden, with 

 its museum and its group of clever men, a very in- 

 teresting account is given. The Exhibition of 1851 is 

 recalled ; and Richardson tells us that its effect — and we 

 may add that of the development of the railways — on the 

 health of women, and consequently on the doctor's income, 

 was one of its unexpected results : women whose lives 

 had been spent in valetudinarianism rose from their sofas, 

 and in the second half of the century forgot that the daily 

 or weekly visits of the doctor had for generations been 

 the principal event in the lives of themselves and such as 

 they. To cycling as a means of health the author gives 

 the same credit. Among other interesting facts he tells 

 us also that he frequently attended in the camps of the 

 gypsies, and found that this nomad way of life was far 

 from a healthy one for the children of these folk 

 In this and innumerable other departments of his life's 

 work the author cannot prevent our perceiving that his 

 devotion to the sick and sorrowful was at least as exem- 

 plary as that of those others of the noble band of genera 

 practitioners to whose ranks he then belonged, and whose 

 self-denying labours he has so admirably recorded. 



Even in the scientific investigations, which more and 

 more occupied his maturer life, love of man and an 

 earnest desire to benefit his race were prominent. Fruitful 

 as such aspirations are, Richardson might perhaps have 

 done more for science if this love of knowledge had 

 been more disinterested. We must not forget that 

 even Pasteurs work was chiefly inspired by the hope 

 of discovering the means of benefiting his fellow men, 

 yet Richardson was not perhaps wholly free from some 

 tinge of that Philistinism which too often colours the 

 ideas of the benevolent man. 



Perhaps Richardson's best work was that on the 

 anaesthetic agents, and on the methods of anaesthesia, 

 whether general or local. In the same spirit he sought 

 a remedy for the terrible effects of clotting of the blood 

 in the heart, or blood-vessels ; and certainly the cases 

 quoted by him in support of the method he advised, 

 must command attention. In the sphere of antiseptic 

 surgery, also, he worked hard at a time when its principles 

 were so little understood that the author himself, neither 

 then nor afterwards, was able to lay hold of the principles 

 of bacteriology, on which study he makes adverse and 

 belated reflections. We were unaware that while working 

 at the ethers Richardson had recommended nitrite of 



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