Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 2.djvu/551

 feelings of pleasure and of sorrow; for, of those who enlivened or adorned it many are since dead, and not a few, like my lamented friend, in the midst of the most active years of life.

The session of that winter was one which few, who were then in the habit of attending the Medical Society, can have forgotten. Very early in it, a discussion occurred concerning the merits of a paper, written by a surgeon now of great eminence in Edinburgh, but, who was considered to have shewn, by the shortness of this contribution to the society, and certain marks of deficient care which it bore, a want of that respect to which an assembly of students was somewhat morbidly sensible. This discussion first brought before the society another friend, whose death I have, within the last few months, to lament, the late Dr. Henry Gaulter, of Manchester, whose great eloquence was only second to his great acquirements and virtues. But the society was, that winter, still more deeply agitated, by the publication of a mock-heroic poem, in which some liberties were taken with its most prominent members. In the warm debates which ensued on the question of expelling the poet, and which were several times adjourned, the society exhibited a picture of the larger world of strife, but without the breaking up of friendships among those who then contended for one side or the other, with an earnestness on which they doubtless often look back with some degree of amusement. These questions being considered of no small importance, had the effect of exciting the members, during the whole of that session, to unusual exertions: every thing was done with spirit