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priving me of the pleasure of dining with a party of friends?" --and then, turning to the coachman, ordered him to put back the carriage, as he should have no occasion for it that afternoon. This was distressing enough to from whose own lips I had the anecdote, and he would readily, ill as he thought himself, have escaped from his dilemma; but that was now impossible; there was a necessity for the consultation to proceed forthwith, and poor Abernethy lost his dinner.

He very seldom, under the most auspicious circumstances, would allow his patients to tell out their whole story; and strange things are related of the droll manner in which he sometimes put a stop to their talking-so strange, that, if half of them were true, Mrs. Hannah More's solution of the wonder, flippantly enough expressed somewhere in her writings, "that people should be so fond of the company of their physician," would by no means have been applicable to Abernethy. The reason she supposes to be "that he is the only person with whom one dares to talk continually of oneself, without interruption, contradiction, or censure. ."* Abernethy would doubtless have disdained to do such homage even at the shrine of Mrs. H. More. Being himself a man of genius, and a great admirer of it in others, he might possibly have so far paid her deference as to have treated her with one of his peculiarly arch and

* What Voltaire says of the physician is much more to the purpose: "A physician is an unfortunate gentleman who is every day required to perform a miracle; namely, to to reconcile health with intemperance."

good-humoured smiles, whilst expressing his surprise that a lady, who thought and wrote so well as she did, should not know the value of her own and his time better than to waste it in so many superfluous words.

I can scarcely believe that upon one occasion his impatience so entirely got the better of him, that he desired. his patient to put out her tongue, and pretending to look at it, wrote his prescription, and then exclaimed-" Now, Madam! you may put it back again." But the following, which is quite characteristic of him, was told me by a friend who vouched for its correctness. A gentleman had paid him, in mistake, a shilling instead of a guinea; but discovering what he had done, he immediately sent a guinea to Abernethy, with an apology for the mistake. "Ah! ah!" says Abernethy, "I shall take care you do not find me a less honest man than yourself." So he wrapt up his shilling and returned it to him.

The fact is, that Abernethy's virtuous abhorrence of Empiricism, and its sordid motives, was for ever impelling him too far in an opposite direction; and to this tendency of his mind and temperament, his eccentricities, which towards the end of his life were not a few, may, I think, be mainly attributed. But posterity will, nevertheless, be just to his memory; and his claim upon our gratitude will be admitted, when his failings, the failings of a great, a good, and most useful man, shall have been long forgotten. In comparing him with other eminent Lecturers at home and abroad, it may be confidently said that he

was nulli secundus. Professors Blumenbach and Cuvier admit, perhaps, of the closest comparison with him in the matter of their lectures, as well as in their popular manner of delivering them, although neither of these distinguished men can be said, in strictness, to have appertained to the same class of Lecturers with Abernethy. Their lectures took a wider range; his were of a more professional and practical character; and this distinction equally interferes with any attempt to compare him with Sir H. Davy, whose very first course of lectures, in London, shed an almost meridian lustre over his rising fame as a philosopher. Such a theatre, in fact, as the Royal Institution, where beauty and fashion courted science, was well calculated to give full expansion to the bursting energies of extraordinary genius. Neither will it be denied that such a scene formed a striking contrast to the sombre walls within which the pupils of Abernethy then gathered daily around him. But, as Coleridge boasted of himself, that no disadvantage of personal appearance or dress checked the ardour of his discourse, or the effect upon others of his conversation, so it may be said, on less suspicious evidence, that Abernethy, when lecturing, required no scenic aid to rivet the attention of his audience to the subject of the lecture, be it what it might. Utility was his grand object; but he contrived to enliven the dryest details of anatomy with such pertinent remarks and illustrations, that the hours of lecture were to his pupils the shortest hours of the day. Above all, be it said to his

praise and honour, that he let no fair opportunity slip of introducing reflections tending to impress upon the minds of his youthful hearers, good and religious sentiments. When engaged in describing the mechanism of the human hand and foot, he would exclaim-" Can we be surprised, gentlemen, that Galen, whose intellect was of the highest order, should have been converted from the scepticism of his youth to the profoundest veneration for his Creator, by the continued contemplation of the wonderful fabric of the human body? It was with reference, more particularly, to the very parts which are now under demonstration, that he gave vent, we are told, to the emotions of his mind in the following sublime language:—' I consider myself, in explaining these instruments,* as composing a solemn hymn to the great Architect of our bodily frame; in which I think there is more true piety, than in sacrificing hecatombs of oxen, or in burning the most costly perfumes; for I first endeavour, from His works, to know Him myself, and afterwards, by the same means, to show Him to others, to inform them how great His wisdom, His goodness, His power !'"

It was an observation of Blumenbach's, that anatomy bears the same relation to physiology which the map of a country does to the natural history of its inhabitants. The former is very useful to travellers, but it is only on account of its relation to the latter. They were so happily blended by Abernethy, as to throw the greatest possible light, each on the other reciprocally, whilst both were brought to bear

*The hands.

most usefully on pathology, or the science which investigates the nature and treatment of diseases. What were his own distinct ideas upon the subject, will be best seen by a quotation from his "Hunterian Oration :”- Haller was a physician, Hunter a surgeon; both were anatomists and physiologists; both, therefore, equally qualified, as far as their knowledge of the animal economy extended, to discern the nature, and mode of cure of the diseases in either department of medical science; yet, doubtless, each most competent to decide upon the best means for effecting the latter purpose, in that to which he had been educated, and his attention chiefly directed. Medicine is one and indivisible; it must be learned as a whole, for no part can be understood, if studied separately. The physician must understand surgery, and the surgeon the medical treatment of diseases. Indeed, it is from the evidence afforded by external diseases, that we are enabled to judge of the nature and progress of those that are internal; which appeared so clearly to Boerhaave, that though his object was to teach his pupils the practice of medicine, he began by teaching them surgery.

"Yet, as medical science is so very extensive, and such accurate knowledge of its various subjects is required, the division of it into two principal departments, which custom has established, may be continued with great propriety and advantage. So much knowledge and talent is requisite in the division of surgery, for the correct re-adjustment of parts, which have been severed, and separated by violence;

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