YOUNG AS A PHYSICIAN. 335 



In spite of his knowledge, perhaps even from the very 

 cause that it was so extensive, Young was totally want- 

 ing in confidence at the bedside of the patient. Then 

 the mischievous effects which might eventually result 

 from the action of the medicine even the most clearly 

 called for presented themselves in a mass to his mind ; 

 seemed to counterbalance the favourable chances which 

 "might attend the use of them; and thus threw him into 

 a state of indecision, no doubt very natural, yet on which 

 the public will always put an unfavourable construc- 

 tion. 



The same timidity showed itself in all the works of 

 Young which treated on medical subjects.* This man, 

 so eminently remarkable for the boldness of his scientific 

 conceptions, gives here no more than a bare enumeration 

 of facts. He seems hardly convinced of the soundness 

 of his thesis, either when he attacks the celebrated 

 Dr. Radcliffe, whose whole secret in the most brilliant 

 and successful practice was, as he has himself said, to 

 employ remedies exactly the reverse of the usual way : 

 or when he combats Dr. Brown, who found himself, as 

 he says, in the disagreeable necessity of recognizing, and 

 that in accordance with the official documents of an hos- 

 pital attended by the most eminent physicians, that, on 

 the average, fevers left to their natural course are neither 



* This timidity in medical speculation is entirely borne out by the 

 tenor of Young's intellectual character as exhibited in such forcible 

 lineaments in the portrait presented to us by Dr. Peacock. His mind 

 was essentially cast in a matter of fact positive, demonstrative mould; 

 hence all subjects of abstract or doubtful inquiry, in which probabili- 

 ties alone could be estimated, or when the conclusions were to be the 

 result of moral discrimination, were utterly unsuited to him. His 

 medical character has been viewed, however, in a much higher light 

 by Dr. Peacock, who has sought to combat the unfavourable impres- 

 sions here advanced. See especially p. 213 and p. 222. Translator. 



