3QO CHARACTER OF FOTHERGILL CHAP. 



Dr. Richard Price and other Whig thinkers. In the 

 circle of his scientific friends, the delightful society of 

 Collinson fostered his love of ordered nature. 



It is well known that the more important part of a 

 doctor's training is that which he receives in the course 

 of his practice. Fothergill's large business brought him 

 into relation with human nature in various forms, and 

 generally on its sadder side. He touched the human 

 factor in the world ; he knew its strength and its weakness, 

 its selfishness and its sacrifice, and the pathos and the 

 tragedy which are often revealed to medical eyes alone. 

 This gave him a mingled tenderness and dignity in his 

 dealing with his patients ; and he was, it is also noted, 

 delicate and scrupulous in his behaviour to persons in 

 inferior stations. He disdained to be the slave of caprice, 

 yet the love that was in him so governed his attitude that 

 his knowledge of his fellows never led to his losing con- 

 fidence in human nature or becoming hardened to its 

 suffering. Rather it opened his sympathies the wider, 

 and made the good of all men his aim and goal. "I 

 am," he once wrote, " the brother of all mankind." 



It has been well said that no life ends, even for this 

 world, when the body which was for a time its home has 

 passed out of sight ; for it enters into the stream of the 

 life of mankind, and there it continues to act with its 

 whole force. 1 Nor is it true Mark Antony said it in 

 irony that only " the evil that men do lives after them." 

 Fothergill's contribution to his own century was not a 

 small one. If he was no leader in medicine like Boerhaave 

 or John Hunter, he was yet eminent among those who 

 give their lives in daily labour to improve medical art, and 

 who build up from one generation to another the edifice 

 of its knowledge. An early clinical physician of the 

 best type, he took an important share in bringing the 

 scientific spirit into English practice, and in founding 

 medical principles upon observation and natural laws. 

 He exerted a wide if less conspicuous influence upon the 

 science of his time. He introduced many new plants and 



1 Prof. J. Stalker, Life of Jesus Christ. 



