1837-38. DISPENSARY PRACTICE. 145 



about finding one. I found the New Town one full. The Old 

 Town Dispensary had the Grassmarket district, which they 

 offered me ; but I felt little inclined to take on me at once the 

 onerous responsibility of so large a district, in which I knew I 

 should be little assisted by superior doctors, but left to blunder 

 my way on through fevers and wounds and distempers. In an 

 agony of fright, and a delirium of suspense, fearful of committing 

 evil, and by the very fear unnerving my hands and paralysing 

 my energies, in short, doomed 'to wade through slaughter to' 

 a knowledge of practice, and bent on learning the profession of 

 a doctor, I articled myself to the Port-Hopetoun Dispensary, 

 where, though their list was full, I was taken on as a subsidiary ; 

 the period I serve being sufficient to give me claims to a certi- 

 ficate, so that I learn and get over all difficulties at the same 

 time. The great recommendation, however, is that, instead of 

 being a principal, I am hooked to my good friend John Niven, 

 with whom I every day perambulate the delightful purlieus of 

 the West Port and the neighbourhood, sometimes steering across 

 the 'bridge that spans' that prince of ditches, the Canal, and at 

 other times winging our flight to the Grassmarket ; and wind- 

 ing up all by journeying to the West Kirk Charity Workhouse, 

 where we have charge of all the little urchins' health and wel- 

 fare. So you see I am a great man in the way of practice, and 

 not destitute at least of patients, and the means of learning that 

 branch of medicine. 



"John Mven is an exceedingly clear-headed fellow, the very 

 opposite of me in perhaps every point and every prejudice ; dif- 

 ferent in the constitution of his mind and body, different in the 

 education he has got, and very different in his views of all sorts 

 of matters. But he is an excellent fellow, gifted by nature with 

 that estimable but unacquirable qualification, ' a physician's 

 sagacity,' which, like the ability to be a poet, of which Montgo- 

 mery speaks, and which you may think far too noble a thing to 

 be placed side by side with the calling of those who 'thrust 

 their solemn phizzes into every abomination/ is nevertheless 

 equally the gift, I said, of nature and of God ; I mean that 

 acute discernment, at a glance, of the state of a patient ; that 

 perception of the change of a symptom, its aggravation or cessa- 



K 



