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of Edinburgh, Session 1872 - 73 . 
Dr Thomas Barnes was born in 1793, near Wigton, in Cumber- 
land. He commenced bis medical studies, according to the fashion 
of the time, by becoming apprentice to a medical practitioner 
in that town; where, among other duties, he had to supply physic 
to horse, dog, and cow, as well as to the human subject, to sell 
pepper and coffee, and to look after his master’s Bosinante. 
Having thus cultivated medicine in a practical way, he proceeded, 
in the inverse order, to study the principles of medicine and its 
fundamental sciences in the University of Edinburgh at the 
age of eighteen. In more recent times medical students carry 
on their studies differently. Apprenticeship is at a sad discount 
with them. They study instead literature, philosophy, and physi- 
cal science, then begin medicine at the root of the tree, and 
end their school studies with that of medical and surgical practice. 
It was different in the time of Dr Barnes’ noviciate ; even in 
my young days, two-and twenty-years later, I was almost a 
solitary example of an unapprenticed British student, working 
till the age of eighteen in the Faculty of Arts and at the Natural 
Sciences, instead of wasting the most precious of his years in 
dispensing drugs, and practising physic before learning it ; and, 
indeed, there are even still some estimable men, laudatores temporis 
acti, who sigh over the now fast vanishing old rule, and lament 
the disappearance of medical apprenticeships, and the loss of 
apprentices. 
Dr Barnes, after studying medicine for six years, partly in this 
University and partly in London, Paris, and Germany, took his 
degree at Edinburgh in 1817. Soon afterwards he settled as 
a consulting physician in Carlisle, where at first he made only 
that slow progress to which those must usually submit who choose 
this the highest class of medical practice, — but where before long 
he became for many years the leading physician over a great 
extent of the northern counties of England. In this pursuit he 
led a life of great professional activity and usefulness till his 56th 
year, when failing health led him to restrict his field. At the 
same time, he did much good to the place of his residence by found- 
ing some, and encouraging and improving other, important charitable 
establishments. Nor did he neglect the improvement of medical 
knowledge. For, though he never contributed any large work to 
