32 FOTHERGILL AS A PHYSICIAN CHAP. 



has not frowned ; I courted not its favours nor feared 

 the reverse." 



We may turn to a private memoir to learn the impres- 

 sion that he made upon his patients. The doctor's 

 presence, so we are told, " was never waited for above a 

 minute or two beyond the time fixed for his coming. His 

 gentle though firm demeanour calmed sorrow into silence. 

 His penetrating eye and abstracted thought always 

 inspired confidence in his judgment [even] though there 

 might appear not the least prospect of success. To him," 

 the writer continues, " my father spoke of his concerns 

 as to a friend, and of his complaints as to a physician of 

 distinguished skill. On being one day asked whether 

 Dr. Heberden should be called, who was the only senior 

 physician, and consequently the only one who could act 

 with the doctor, he replied, ' No ; my life is in God's 

 hand and Fothergill's.' ' She goes on to describe the 

 scene when her father lay dying, how tenderly Fothergill 

 took her mother by the hand, and stroked the daughter's 

 face, as he spoke faltering words of sympathy. 1 



In the next place, his medical training had been 

 thorough, grounded as it was upon anatomy, and upon 

 full courses of botany and chemistry, with the best 

 clinical teaching that Edinburgh and London could 

 afford. He knew Hippocrates well, and Aretaeus and 

 Celsus, but he was imbued with the spirit of " the great 

 Boerhaave (so he wrote), who did much in the theory of 

 physic, in respect to separating truth from falsehood, 

 certainty from hypothesis " ; Rationalem quidem puto 

 medicinam esse debere, he would say, et instrui ab evi- 

 dentibus causis. 



In estimating Fothergill's position as a therapeutist, we 

 may pause to consider the state of that science in his age. A 

 revolution was in progress during the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries in the use of medicines. In few depart- 

 ments of life have the rules of tradition maintained a longer 

 and firmer hold than in the healing art. Pharmacy in the 



1 MS. Memoirs of Barbara Hoyland, by herself. Extracts are quoted in 

 the Journal of Friends' Historical Society, iii. 131. 



