Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 2.djvu/564

 to such applications, his sagacity and his candour were always very conspicuous.

Excepting a visit to Gloucester, of which I find the recorded results in an account, in one of his note-books, of the lunatic asylum and hospital of that city, and in a letter, in which he describes to me the pleasure he had experienced from having an opportunity of seeing and conversing with Dr. Baron, the distinguished biographer of Dr. Jenner, I believe he seldom left home, even for one day, during the nine years which he lived, after our visit to London. The history of any one day, during all this period, would be almost the history of his life. He rose early, often wrote or studied before breakfast, saw his patients with the utmost regularity, and had, generally, gone through what, to many, would have appeared a day's occupation, before eleven o'clock, the hour when, of late years, he visited the hospital. The interruptions of a physician's life, in a large town, are almost incessant; and, knowing, as I do, how much of this he had to suffer, I can only express surprise when I consider the number of engagements which he voluntarily incurred, and the accuracy with which he found time to arrange his thoughts on a great variety of professional and of general subjects. During all these years, his casebooks shew a continual attention to every thing which occurred in his practice; and, besides several small volumes filled with notes of single cases, he had, on some particular subjects, collected so many as to form the ground-work of essays, or of larger works which he meditated, and which, if longer life had been accorded to him, he would have completed.