Page:Memoir of Dr James Alexander (1795-1863), Wooler by his son-in-law, Sir John Struthers, 1863.pdf/11

 removed to a neighbouring cottage, where a stimulant was administered, he recovered consciousness so far as to be able to relate that he had dismounted to pick up his whip, which he had dropped, and had been knocked over by the horse; that being his impression of what had evidently been the result of the apoplectic seizure. He was conveyed home, unconsciousness deepened into coma, and on the evening of the fourth day, the 23rd of November 1863, he passed away. He had reached his sixty-seventh year. A tombstone in the Wooler Churchyard marks his resting-place.

It is almost needless to say that a man of this stamp held a high position in a locality in which he practised for more than forty years. His practice was extensive, all that the district admitted of, and he was on terms of intimacy and personal esteem with all classes of the community. One is apt to feel that a man of such capacity and attainments was in a measure lost in such a position. That he would have taken a high position had his lot been cast in the metropolis or in connection with the medical school, there can be little doubt. At the same time we must not underestimate the value and influence of such a life. The great majority of the profession are and must be country practitioners; the hardest work of the profession is done by them; in the winter nights, when the world is asleep, they have many a long and weary drive; they are far from libraries, from hospitals and museums, and from societies; and thus in their comparative isolation want that stimulus and guidance which tend to keep the city practitioner up to the mark. It depends more upon himself what the country practitioner shall be, whether he shall succumb to the influences around him, or resolve on a plan of life and work up to to. It has been truly said that if the country practitioner is a man of observation and reading, he is in the best position to develop the whole medical man, for unlike the town man, he has not the consultants and specialists at his elbow, and must rely on himself in every branch and corner of his profession; his intimacy, too, with his patients, closer than the town practitioner can have, gives him greater influence among them, and perhaps a deeper insight into human nature. The subject of this notice was essentially such a man, and we must not therefore underrate the influence and usefulness of such a life wherever it may have been spent. The presence of such a man in the community must have been beneficial to a degree which it is not easy to calculate. As he moved about his district from day to day, not merely alleviating