WILLIAM CUMING, M.D. 



51 



of my advanced years ; those that remain, who consulted me 

 professionally soon after my arrival in this place, still visit and 

 consult me ; and retired from business as I am, and almost 

 wholly confined within doors, when I can contribute but little to 

 their benefit or amusement, I have the singular satisfaction not 

 to be forgotten, but to be visited by gentlemen the most respect- 

 able in the county for probity, rank, and fortune." There was, 

 no doubt, a spice of the canny Scot in his procedure when he 

 began practice at Dorchester. Archer, as Cuming remarks, 

 "was no formidable rival, to be sure, but I cultivated his friend- 

 ship and gained it." He tells us also that during this critical 

 time he lost no friend whom he had once made. A friendship, 

 which might have been expected to result in a closer tic, 

 subsisted between him and IMiss IMary Oldfield. From their 

 contemporaries my mother heard that " Dr. Cuming never 

 married ; but he and Miss Polly Oldfield, a clever and attractive 

 woman, were greatly attached to each other in a Platonic 

 fashion, which amused their friends and neighbours. They 

 almost always spent their evenings together, but, when they 

 met at a party or at a friend's house, the doctor always saw her 

 safe home, attending carefully to her wraps in cold weather and 

 carrying a lantern on dark nights." In his will he bcciucathed 

 "the picture of the late Mary Oldfield" to the wife of William 

 Templeman, a Dorchester lawyer, and to tlie wife of John 

 Templeman, "Attorney in Dorchester" (youngest brother of 

 William), he gave " the funeral inscription to the memory of the 

 said Mary Oldfield with the gilt frame and glass in which it is 

 enclosed." 



Mention has been made of Fothergill and Russell, his fellow 

 students at Edinburgh, Frampton, of INIoreton, associated with 

 the early days of Cuming's settlement in Dorchester, and 

 Lettsom, whose cheerful letters must have brightened the elder 

 doctor's later years. With these we may number Samuel Gould, 

 the Dorchester bookseller. Writing about the Biographical and 

 Literary Anecdotes of W. Boivyer, Cuming asks the author (John 

 Nichols) for a print of Bowyer's portrait, prefixed to the book, 



