163 
Home Department. 
THE PUEE BIOGRAPHICAL. 
When the ingenious Mr. Puff enumerated before his 
sneering but diverted audience the various arts of prac- 
titioners in panegyric or professors in the art of puffing, and 
dilated, with all the affectionate partiality of an author, upon 
“ the puff direct, the puff preliminary, the puff collateral, the 
puff collusive, and the puff oblique, or puff by implication/’ 
he evidently thought the art he professed had been brought 
to a state of perfection. Poor Puff! He would have straight- 
way hanged himself could he have foreseen how he would 
have been surpassed in the latter half of the nineteenth 
by the invention of the puff biographical. 
Some three or four years ago, a certain versatile contem- 
porary, no doubt finding it necessary to add some new attrac- 
tion to keep the last few sparks of life together, and satisfied 
with anything which imparted a show of light, even though 
it were but a phosphorescent gleam of rottenness, began the 
publication of a series of so-called biographies of living mem- 
bers of the profession, illustrated by hideous caricatures, dig- 
nified by the name of likenesses. This plan has since been 
taken up by rival hands, and executed in a manner yet more 
contemptible. Week after week has one of these biographical 
sketches and portraits appeared in one or other of the rival 
books of medical beauty, issued in different parts of the Strand; 
and, strange to say, the subjects have not only been young, 
pushing surgeons, or “ distinguished” specialists, but some of 
the dii majores of our art have undoubtedly assisted to perfect 
the practice of the professors of this new species of puff. 
There can be no question of the truth of this charge ; for the 
sketches have generally contained such family details as the 
subject of the portrait, his brother, or his wife, could alone 
have supplied. One i£ distinguished ophthalmic surgeon” is 
decended from a family which held lands in Wiltshire since 
1437, and is collaterally connected with the Fitzbattleaxes. 
Other surgeons and physicians, whose position should have 
placed them above temptation, inform the world who was 
their wife’s maternal grandfather, where their father lived, and 
what a distinguished oriental scholar or practical chemist he 
was ; whom their grandfathers married ; how many brothers 
and sisters they had ; how an elder brother made important 
