Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/92

40 adopted it for their text-book, and were loud in their encomiums of its merits. Still however, this was but the foundation-stone of his future distinction. Bell had determined to be "chief of his profession in character," and to attain this daring height much had to be surmounted. He commenced as a public lecturer, but upon a humble and disadvantageous scale, as he was still an alien in London; and his early discoveries upon the nervous system, which he was patiently maturing, as his future highest claims to distinction, were as yet but little esteemed by the public, and would be compelled to force their way slowly into notice, if they should ever chance to be noticed. In 1807, the same year in which he commenced his course of lectures, he published his "System of Operative Surgery," a work where all the operations described in it were the result not of mere theory or reading, but of personal experience.

It was amidst this disheartening amount of unthanked, unappreciated toil and disappointment that Charles Bell sought a comforter of his cares; and in 1811 he married Miss Shaw, who not only justified his choice, but made him brother-in-law to two men whose pursuits were congenial to his own. These were John and Alexander Shaw, whom his lessons and example raised into distinguished anatomists and physiologists, while the latter ultimately became the most effective champion of his preceptor's claims to originality in his physiological and anatomical discoveries. Bell's darkened horizon now began to clear, and his worth to be properly estimated. In 1811, the happy year of his marriage, after he had long remained unconnected with any medical school or association, he was allied to the Hunterian School in Windmill Street, as joint lecturer with Mr. Wilson. The extent of his knowledge and power of illustrating it, exhibited in his prelections, and the happy facility of demonstration and expression which he had always at command, soon made his lectures popular, so that in 1814 he was appointed surgeon to the Middlesex Hospital; and here his remarkable skill as an operator, combined with his style of lecturing, which, although not eloquent, was full of thought very strikingly expressed, made him a favourite both with patients and pupils. The result of his labours there, which continued till 1836, enabled him to make the honest boast at his departure, that he had left the institution, which at his entrance was but of small account, "with full wards, and ₤120,000 in the funds."

As the whole of the preceding period, up to the date of Napoleon's banishment to St. Helena, had been a season of war, the professional talents of Bell had been in request in our military hospitals, and upon the Continent, as well as in London, so that in 1809, immediately after the battle of Corunna, he quitted the metropolis, to attend upon the wounded of the British army. Here his opportunities of acquiring fresh knowledge were eagerly embraced, and the result of his experience was an essay on gun-shot wounds, which appeared as an appendix to his "System of Operative Surgery," published in 1807. After the battle of Waterloo, he also repaired to Brussels, and took the charge of an hospital; and here he was engaged for three successive days and nights in operating upon and dressing the wounds of three hundred soldiers. Of these cases he made various drawings in water-colouring, which are reckoned among the best specimens of such productions in our anatomical school. The following extracts of a letter which he wrote from Brussels to his brother, the distinguished barrister in Edinburgh, will give a clear idea of the occupations of Charles Bell in this labour, which he so kindly and gratuitously undertook, as well as of the men who were now his patients:—"I have just returned from seeing the French