Page:Memoir of Dr James Alexander (1795-1863), Wooler by his son-in-law, Sir John Struthers, 1863.pdf/3

2 farms, skirted by the Cheviots, giving a Highland aspect to the scenery, and implying many long rides to the shepherds' huts which are scattered among the glens. Practice in such a district, extending as his practice came to do some ten miles in either direction, was necessarily laborious, involving long rides, much exposure, and frequent want of sleep. He drove partly, but some of the roads were so hilly that he was more frequently in the saddle. But naturally active and energetic, he did not feel this, and took pleasure in his daily rounds, endowed as he was with a genial many-sidedness which enabled him to find sources of interest and pleasure where some men would have experienced only the dulness and fatigue of daily routine. His habit of keeping up his general as well as his professional reading no doubt contributed to this. After twenty or thirty miles in the saddle, with the breeze in one's face, it is no easy matter to find time for evening study, or wakefulness to pursue it, but Mr Alexander managed somehow to do this. Much of his reading was accomplished during his daily rounds. He read everywhere, riding, driving, or sitting by the bedside of his patients, and often in bed both in his own house and elsewhere. Many a down-come of his horse was the consequence. The danger of this became so evident that his family endeavoured latterly to prevent him taking a book with him, and his combined love of reading and amiability of character were sometimes amusingly illustrated by his innocent stratagems to conceal the book, and his laughingly yielding it up when it was found on him or secreted in some unlikely place. His habit of reading in bed on one occasion got him into an amusing predicament in a friend's house. His light having been accidentally extinguished, he ventured out into the passage to try to relight it, forgot which was his own bedroom door among several around him, and was obliged to stand in the middle of the night en robe de nuit and call loudly to the gentleman of the house to extricate him from his undesirable situation.

With such tastes and habits it need hardly be added that Mr Alexander was well acquainted with the literature of his profession, and that he kept abreast of what was new. Although familiar with the writings of the older physicians, he was far from being a man of the old school, and was sparing in his use of drugs and of the lancet. He early used the stethoscope when some men of his standing were sneering at it, and he was at all times ready and indeed eager for surgical operations, not merely those of emergency