G. T. Bettany

“ Yet Darwin’s achievements far transcend his advantages of ancestry, surroundings, previous suggestion, position. He stands magnificently conspicuous as a genius of rare simplicity of soul, of unwearied patience of observation, of striking fertility and ingenuity of method, of unflinching devotion to and belief in the efficacy of truth. He revolutionised not merely half-a-dozen sciences, but the whole current of thinking men’s mental life. ”

“ Nothing is so cruel as ignorance. For how many centuries had human sufferers to bear pain which is now preventable by better knowledge? How many thousands festered to death in small-pox before the discovery of vaccination? How many are now dying of tubercle and scrofula whom a better knowledge of their conditions might rescue? Yet the pursuit of this knowledge is hindered in England by the outcry of cruelty—the cruelty being no more than the inoculation of some of the lower animals with tubercular and scrofulous matter, in order to study the course of the disease and the modes of prevention. ”

“ It is the story of one who kept his affections young, and his love of the pure and the refined unsullied, while fighting bravely the battle of life; whose heart was as tender as his intellect was vigorous and original who, while he gained a foremost place among his fellows, turned with undiminished zest to his home and his friends, and found there the object, the reward, and the solace of his life. ”

“ ADDISON, BRIGHT, AND THE DISEASES WHICH BEAR THEIR NAMES. Operative dexterity, as was natural, arrived more quickly at perfection than did medical treatment. In fact, no one will pretend that medicine has yet travelled far, in comparison with its future achievements, when physiology, pathology, and therapeutics shall have become more complete. Thomas Addison is a specimen of the physicians of genius who have adorned this century. He is known as the discoverer of a disease which bears his name; but his true fame rests upon his practical talent in diagnosing disease. ”

“ When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen ”

“ Again he says: “My fame is in the hands of others. I have weighed in a nice and scrupulous balance, whether it be better to serve men, or to be praised by them, and I prefer the former. It does more to tranquillise the mind; whereas fame, and the breath of popular applause, is but a bubble, a feather, and a dream. Such wealth as such fame gives, those who have scraped it together, and those who value it highly, are fully free to enjoy, only let them remember that the mechanical arts (and sometimes the meanest of them) bring greater gains, and make richer heirs.” ”

“ Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, I am convinced that the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness; we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life ”

“ Again, he characterises the profession of medicine in noble terms. “The profession of medicine having for its end the common good of mankind, knows nothing of national enmities, of political strife, of sectarian divisions. Disease and pain the sole conditions of its ministry, it is disquieted by no misgivings about the justice or the honesty of its client’s cause; but dispenses its peculiar benefits, without stint or scruple, to men of every country or party, and rank and religion, and to men of no religion at all. ”

“ The impression made upon him by his first experience of London, on a Sunday in November, was thus expressed: “If this be the season that John Bull selects for cutting his throat, Sunday must be the day, for then London is in all its ugliness, all its naked deformity; the houses are like ruins, the streets deserted.” He was soon rather unceremoniously told by a hospital surgeon that they could manufacture their own raw material, and if he had difficulties in Edinburgh, he would have more in London. ”

“ A grass plot, a plant in bloom, a human gesture, the entire circle of the doings and tendencies of nature, builds his monument and records his exploits.... The Abbey has its orators and ministers who have convinced senates and swayed nations. Not one of them all has wielded a power over men and their intelligences more complete than that which for the last twenty-three years has emanated from a simple country house in Kent. Memories of poets breathe about the mighty church. Science invokes the aid of imagination no less than poetry. Darwin as he searched, imagined. ”

“ I can imagine no boldness greater than his would be, who would neglect the study of his profession, and yet venture on the charge of interests like these; and I can imagine no ambition more honourable, no envy so praiseworthy, as that which strives to emulate the acquirements of those who are daily occupied in giving safe guidance through the perilous passages of disease, and who, in all these various difficulties and dangers, can act with the energy and calmness that are the just property of knowledge. ”

“ A light is thus thrown on his even career of uniform progress. Training his powers from youth upwards, by linguistic and literary studies, by scientific pursuits, by the diligent practice of his art, by mixing with men, he brought to bear on the multifarious questions which come before a great master of healing, a mind alike accustomed to acquire and to communicate, a temper made gentle by considerate kindness, a tact that became all but unerring from his perfect integrity. He saw that every material science conduces to the well-being of man ”

“ One thing struck me, although it is not rare in England, where animals are loved. A heifer and a colt were feeding close to us with the tranquillity which tells of good masters, and I heard the joyful barking of dogs. ‘Truly,’ I said to myself, ‘the history of the variations of animals was written here, and observations must be going on, for Darwin is never idle.’ I did not suspect that I was walking above the dwellings of those lowly beings called earthworms, the subject of his last work, in which Darwin showed once more how little causes in the long run produce great effects. ”

“ His manner towards his fellow-practitioners was as pleasing as his conduct to patients. To both he would carefully explain, as far as possible, his views of the nature of the case and the treatment required, and he was exceedingly successful in tranquillising the apprehensions of his patients. His modesty was transparent. He would say to his friends: “I know better perhaps than another man, from my knowledge of anatomy, how to discover a disease, but when I have done so, I do not know better how to cure it.” ”

“ In the first place, no patient has been treated by me otherwise than I would myself wish to be treated under the same complaint. In the second, I have ever held that any accession whatever to the art of healing, even if it went no further than the cutting of corns or the curing of toothaches, was of far higher value than all the knowledge of fine points, and all the pomp of subtle speculations—matters which are as useful to physicians in driving away diseases, as music is to masons in laying bricks. ”

“ Why, if species are continually being modified, do we not see multitudes of transitional forms around us? How can the elaborate structure and special habits of a bat have been formed by the modification of some animal of entirely different habits? How can the marvellous perfections of the human eye or that of one of the higher animals be supposed to have arisen through natural selection? These questions Darwin answers with powerful effect ”

“ Maudsley, “is, that I have been engaged all my life in dealing with mind in its concrete human embodiments, and that in order to find out why individuals feel, think, and do differently, and in what way best to deal with them so as to do one’s duty to oneself and to them, I have had no choice but to leave the barren heights of speculation for the plains on which men live and move and have their being. It is not enough to think and talk about abstract minds and their qualities when you have to do with concrete minds that must be observed, and studied, and managed.” ”

“ Besides their broad, accurate, vivid delineations of disease—portraits drawn to the life, and by a great master—and their wise, simple, rational rules for treatment, active and negative, general and specific—there are two great principles continually referred to as supreme in the art of medicine. The first is that nature cures diseases; that there is a recuperative and curative power, the vis medicatrix, in every living organism, implanted in it by the Almighty, and that it is by careful reverential scrutiny of this law of restoration that all our attempts at cure are to be guided ”

“ In 1864 was published the first edition of Parkes’s “Manual of Practical Hygiene,” a masterly book, accurate, learned, clear, full, and of the highest interest to the thoughtful mind. The introduction to this work opens with a clear definition of the subject. “Hygiene is the art of preserving health; that is, of obtaining the most perfect action of body and mind during as long a period as is consistent with the laws of life. In other words, it aims at rendering growth more perfect, decay less rapid, life more vigorous, death more remote.” ”

“ Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but, above all, the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration. A most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore ”

“ Anatomy he professed to learn and teach, not from books, but from dissections, not from the positions of philosophers, but from the fabric of Nature. In the introduction to his Treatise on Generation he praises the “more excellent way” of those “who, following the traces of nature with their own eyes, pursued her through devious but most assured ways till they reached her in the citadel of truth. And truly in such pursuits,” he goes on, “it is sweet not merely to toil, but even to grow weary, when the pains of discovering are amply compensated by the pleasures of discovery. ”

“ There is not a day that I do not in my practice employ some of the modes of treatment which Graves excels in describing with the minuteness of the true practitioner, and not a day that I do not, from the bottom of my heart, thank the Dublin physician for the information he has given me.”
“Graves is in my acceptation of the term a perfect clinical teacher. An attentive observer, a profound philosopher, an ingenious artist, an able therapeutist, he commends to our admiration the art whose domain he enlarges, and the practice of which he renders more useful and more fertile.” ”

“ Darwinism is held with vital grip and will therefore not become a dead creed, a fossil formula. The belief that every generation is a step in progress to a higher and fuller life contains within it the promise of a glorious evolution which is no longer a faint hope, but a reasoned faith. ”

“ Verily, I am sure that, when the last day of my life shall have come upon me, I shall carry in my heart a willing witness that shall speak, not only to the care and honesty with which I have laboured for the health of both rich and poor who have intrusted themselves to my care, but also to those efforts which I have made to the best of my power, and with all the energies of my mind, to give certainty to the treatment of diseases even after my death, if such may be. ”

“ Gentlemen, if you require an apology for detaining you so long, I find ample material for that apology in the lively interest in which we must all feel in the comfort and happiness of the other sex, doomed as they are, both by the decrees of Providence and by human institutions, to drink deep of the bitter cup of suffering. ”

“ Sensitive, sociable, a good talker, high-spirited and somewhat irascible, a man who admitted no one to his friendship whom he could not thoroughly respect, the friend of the poor, prescribing gratuitously to all who were needy, pre-eminent for sympathy, which for a time made him hate his profession for the constant suffering it brought before his eyes—such was Charles Darwin’s father. ”

“ There is no question that in general education, in manners, in delivery, in all that makes the successful lecturer and the attractive practitioner, William Hunter greatly excelled his brother. Dr. Baillie has said of him, “No one ever possessed more enthusiasm for his art, more persevering industry, more acuteness of investigation, more perspicuity of expression, or indeed, a greater share of natural eloquence. He excelled very much any lecturer whom I have ever heard in the clearness of his arrangements, the aptness of his illustrations, and the elegance of his diction.” ”

“ To Down, occasionally, came distinguished men from many lands; and there in later years would sometimes be found the younger generation of scientific students, looking up to the great naturalist with the reverence of disciples, who had experienced his singular modesty, his patient readiness to listen to all opinions, and the winning grace with which he informed their ignorance and corrected their mistakes. In the midst of all the delights of home and the demands of study, Darwin kept an open mind for public affairs. ”

“ The body lies there, pale and motionless, except only that the jaw sinks slowly but perceptibly. The pallor visibly increases, becomes more leaden in hue, and the profound tranquil sleep of death reigns where just now were life and movement. ”

“ In how wise and firm a tone does Sydenham denounce and demolish the quacks and patent medicine vendors! He considers that any man who can, by any sure line of treatment, or by the application of any specific remedy, control the course of diseases or cut them short, is bound by every possible bond to reveal to the world in general so great a blessing to his race. ”

“ Darwin impresses forcibly on his readers the endless diversity of structures, and the prodigality of resources displayed for gaining the same end, the fertilisation of one flower by pollen from another plant. “The more I study nature,” he says, “the more I become impressed with ever-increasing force that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations slowly acquired through each part occasionally varying in a slight degree ... transcend in an incomparable manner the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could invent.” ”