A Book About Doctors

The country doctor, such as we know him--a well-read and observant man, skilful in his art, with a liberal love of science, and in every respect a gentleman--is so recent a crea...

Radcliffe, the Jacobite partisan, the physician without learning, and the luxurious _bon-vivant_, who grudged the odd sixpences of his tavern scores, was born at Wakefield in Yo...

"So then the subject being so variable, hath made the art by consequence more conjectural; an art being conjectural hath made so much the more place to be left for imposture. Fo...

Honour has flowed to physicians by the regular channels of professional duty in but scant allowance. Their children have been frequently ennobled by marriage or for political se...

Astrology, alchemy, the once general belief in the healing effects of the royal touch, the use of charms and amulets, and mesmerism, are only various exhibitions of one supersti...

Of the generosity of physicians one _need_ say nothing, for there are few who have not experienced or witnessed it; and one _had better_ say nothing, as no words could do justic...

"For in all times, in the opinion of the multitude, witches and old women and impostors have had a competition with physicians. And what followeth? Even this, that physicians sa...

"Then, sir," said Mrs. Mallet, "if you'll only not look so frightened, I'll tell you how it was. It is now twenty years ago that I was very unfortunate. I was not more than thir...

The old proverb says, "Every man is a physician or a fool by forty." Sir Henry Halford happening to quote the old saw to a circle of friends, Canning, with a pleasant humour smi...

From the earliest times the Leech (Leighis), or healer, has found, in the exercise of his art, not only a pleasant sense of being a public benefactor, but also the means of priv...

"Medicine is a science which hath been, as we have said, more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced; the labour having been, in my judgment, rather in cir...

It is in memory of John Bond, M.A., the learned commentator on Horace and Persius. Educated at Winchester school, and then at New College, Oxford, he was elected master of the T...

Gabriel Fallopius, who has given his name to a structure with which anatomists are familiar, gave the same reproof in a more delicate manner. With a smile he replied in the word...

Baldwin Hamey, whose manuscript memoirs of eminent physicians are among the treasures of the College, praises Winston because he treated his apothecary as a master might a slave...

In the entire history of charlatanism, however, it would be difficult to point to a career more extraordinary than the brilliant though brief one of St. John Long, in our own cu...

For many a day authors have had the reputation of being more sensitive and quarrelsome than any other set of men. Truth to tell, they are not always so amiable and brilliant as...

Amongst the celebrities of the medical profession, who have left no memorial behind them more durable or better known than their wills in Doctors' Commons, was Messenger Monsey,...

Unquestionably the lot of Richard Mead was an enviable one. Without any high advantages of birth or fortune, or aristocratic connection, he achieved a European popularity; and i...

The medical buildings of London are seldom or never visited by the sight-seers of the metropolis. Though the science and art of nursing have recently been made sources of amusem...

Fashion, capricious everywhere, is especially so in surgery and medicine. Smoking we are now taught to regard as a pernicious practice, to be abhorred as James the First abhorre...

Amongst the physicians of the seventeenth century were three Brownes--father, son, and grandson. The father wrote the "Religio Medici," and the "Pseudoxia Epidemica"--a treatise...

Properly treated and fully expanded, this subject of "the stick" would cover all the races of man in all regions and all ages; indeed, it would hide every member of the human fa...

The lives of three physicians--Sydenham, Sir Hans Sloane, and Heberden--completely bridge over the uncertain period between old empiricism and modern science. The son of a wealt...

The term quack is applicable to all who, by pompous pretences, mean insinuations, and indirect promises, endeavour to obtain that confidence to which neither education, merit, n...

High amongst literary, and higher yet amongst benevolent, physicians must be ranked John Coakley Lettsom, formerly president of the Philosophical Society of London. A West India...

There were two Akensides--Akenside the poet, and Akenside the man; and of the _man_ Akenside there were numerous subdivisions. Remarkable as a poet, he was even yet more notewor...

At a very early date the effects of magnetic influences, and the ordinary phenomena of nervous excitement, were the source of much confusion and perplexity to medical speculator...

The writer of this volume has endeavoured to collect, in a readable and attractive form, the best of those medical Ana that have been preserved by tradition or literature. In do...