DR. R. W. DARWIN. 



15 



son of the first marquis) felt so much interest about me, whom 

 he had never seen, and my family. When forty new members 

 (the forty thieves as they were then called) were added to the 

 Athen^um Club, there was much canvassing to be one of 

 them; and without my having asked any one, Lord Lans- 

 downe proposed me and got me elected. If I am right in my 

 supposition, it was a queer concatenation of events that my 

 father not eating cheese half-a-century before in Holland led 

 to my election as a member of the Athenaeum. 



" The sharpness of his observation led him to predict with 

 remarkable skill the course of any illness, and he suggested 

 endless small details of relief. I was told that a young doctor 

 in Shrewsbury, who disliked my father, used to say that he 

 was wholly unscientific, but owned that his power of predict- 

 ing the end of an illness was unparalleled. Formerly when 

 he thought that I should be a doctor, he talked much to me 

 about his patients. In the old days the practice of bleeding 

 largely was universal, but my father maintained that far more 

 evil was thus caused than good done ; and he advised me if 

 ever I was myself ill not to allow any doctor to take more 

 than an extremely small quantity of blood. Long before ty- 

 phoid fever was recognised as distinct, my father told me that 

 two utterly distinct kinds of illness were confounded under 

 the name of typhus fever. He was vehement against drink- 

 ing, and was convinced of both the direct and inherited evil 

 effects of alcohol when habitually taken even in moderate 

 quantity in a very large majority of cases. But he admitted 

 and advanced instances of certain persons who could drink 

 largely during their whole lives without apparently suffering 

 any evil effects, and he believed that he could often before- 

 hand tell who would thus not suffer. He himself never drank 

 a drop of any alcoholic fluid. This remark reminds me of a 

 case showing how a witness under the most favourable cir- 

 cumstances may be utterly mistaken. A gentleman-farmer 

 was strongly urged by my father not to drink, and was en- 

 couraged by being told that he himself never touched any 

 spirituous liquor. Whereupon the gentleman said, 'Come, 



