THE HISTORY OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S HOSPITAL.• Ire these two great
volumes Dr. Norman Moore, the most dis- tinguished living representative of the long line of scholarly physician attached to St. Bartholomew's, has nobly repaid his aperrhpts to the noble Hospital with which his whole professional life has been connected. They have been written in his leisure hours during thirty years, and are a gift to St. Bartholomew's, the cost of the splendid facsimiles of charters and other illus- trations, nearly fifty in all, having been generously defrayed by Alias E. M. Portal. No institution of the kind is richer in docu- ments of first-rate importance than St. Bartholomew's, and the zeal and pains taken by the author in examining, transcribing, and elucidating them have been above praise. Our only regret is that in dealing with a work on so vast a scale it is impossible within the limits of a single short review to do more than merely sketch its contents.
The first volume describes the site ; the life of Rahere, the founder, and his successor, Thomas of St. Osyth's ; the time of Henry Fitz-Ailwin, first Mayor of London ; the scribes of the thirteenth century, whose beautiful penmanship adorns these pages ; and concludes with separate chapters on the reign of Edward I., II., and III. and Richard H. The dual constitution of St. Bartholomew's—Augustinian Priory and Hospital— lasted from 1123, when it was founded by Rahere, a pious man of lowly origin, as the result of a pilgrimage to Rome and a vision of St. Bartholomew, till the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. Henry I. granted the land ; the Bishop of London, Richard de Belinda, lent his episcopal influence ; but Hospital and Priory were both the work of one man and were both complete in his lifetime. The volume is a record of the grants and charters, concessions and benefactions, during the old Order ; at the same time it throws a flood of light on contem. porary medical knowledge, and is a mine of curious information, topographical and aerial, relating to mediaeval London.
The second volume opens with the Life of John Cok, the fourth of the seven worthies of the Hospital specially honoured by Dr. Norman Moore. John Cok was originally a goldsmith by trade, who spent the greater part of his life in the Hospital as a Brother of the Order. But he was a scholar and scribe as well as an attendant on the sick, and his greatest work was the .Cartulary, or book containing copies of charters, Royal grants, records of rents, tenants, lists of houses, and inventories of professions. This was written in 1456, and is a marvel of beauti- ful penmanship. It is no dry catalogue, but full of human touches. Dr. Norman Moore's account of Cok's survey is rich in felicitous comment, notably in dealing with famous tenants and the literary associations of Little Britain. Here he himself lived for • The History of .51. Bartholomew's Floopilal. By Norman stoma MD, p,a,c,p., Cowan-log Phyelelao to Bt. Bartholomew's Hoepltal, li00011111 Yellow of Bt. Cathatine's Cologe, Cambridge. t vole. London C. Arthur Pewees. [63 35.1 twenteone years as student, House Physician, and Warden of the College of St. Bartholomew's. in Duke Street, formerly Duck Lane, frequented by Dryden, mentioned by Swift and Garth, and immortalized as the scene of the publication of the Stet number of Addison's Spectator on March let, 1711. The old Order ended with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. The Brothers were dispersed, and the property of the Hospital passed into the King's hands in the following year. In 1544 Henry VIII. granted letters-patent reconstituting the Hospital for its original purposes, under the name of the House of the Poor in West Smithfield. But the old name was too strong for the new enactment, though the agreement of 1547, confirmed in 1782, is the foundation of the present constitution, and the offices then created mostly remain to this day. The accuracy of the Ledgers of receipts and expenditure was attested by a judgment of Sir George Jessel in 1878, when he described the Hospital documents as remarkable for their fullness and particu- larity. The journals of the meetings of the Governors begin in 1549, recording events great and small, from the list of house- holders and servants for the levy against Spain to the grant of permission to the steward to marry. The notice of the General Court in 1911 is printed to show how the ancient procedure recorded in the minutes of the first meeting in 1549 has been substantially preserved to the present day.
The organization of medicine as a profession in London by the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians antedated the institution of the new order in St. Bartholomew's by some thirty years. It grew out of the revival of learning, the study of Greek, and in particular of Hippocrates and Galen. To Linaere (on whose advice Henry VIII. founded the College of Physicians), " a man of the new learning though of ancient piety," it is due, in Dr. Norman Moore's phrase, that " physicians in England have always been held to be part of the learned world, and have maintained a liberal conduct and a standard of know- ledge worthy of that association." The example of his life
rout' es a living force to this day. Dr. Caius, his devoted follower, second founder and for a while Master of Gonville College, scholar and traveller, nine times President of the College of Physicians, lived for many years as Tenant of St. Bartholo- mew's, and died there in 1573, distinguished, like his teacher, by his humanity, his love of learning, his public and private generosity. Under the new order a Physician was specially attached to St. Bartholomew's, and the first was the notorious Dr. Itoderigo Lonna (Lopez), a Portuguese Jew of undoubted skill who became Physician to the Queen's Household in 1586, and was executed at Tyburn on June 7th, 1594, after being con- victed of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth. Marlowe and Middleton both refer to him by name, and there is at least presumptive evidence that Shakespeare bad his nationality and schemes in his mind when he imagined Shylock.
A separate chapter is given to Harvey, " the most famous of all the great men whose names occur in the history of St. Bar- tholomew's Hoapital." Like Caine, he was a doctor of Padua, a traveller, and a scholar, widely read in the classics, though he never alludes to English literature. Apart. from Harvey's great discovery., his patient investigations, and the extreme lucidity of his method of exposition, Dr. Norman Moore gives interegting details of his eminent patients, his presence at the battle of Edgehill, and his four years' residence with the Court at Oxford. Harvey's successors are then passed in review, including Edward Browne, the scholarly son of the great Sir Thomas ; Askew, bibliophile and traveller ; Austin, the versatile and industrious, nobly commemorated in Cowper's sonnet ; Farre, captain of Charterhouse in Thackeray's day and charmingly recalled in The Adventures of Philip ; Black and Gee, both praised by the present Laureate in Latin elegiacs. Thence we pass to the Surgeons of the old Guild, and to Aber- nethy, the subject of a quite admirable appreciation of the man, his methods as a lecturer, and the incalculable services he ren• tiered to medical teaching at St. Bartholomew's and throughout England. No one could use illustrative anecdote with more thrilling effect, witness the story told on pp. 655-56, Vol. IL As for his abrupt and caustic speeches and repartees,Dr. Norman Moore observes that " they were not more severe than the urea- . lion demanded, and like those of Dr. Johnson were not incom- patible with a most tender heart." Of his successors, Sir James Paget was the chief surgeon of the Victorian age, and after Abernethy the greatest benefactor of the school. These brief studies of the later surgeons, all of whom were known to the writer, are written with rare skill and sympathy, but they are
not mere exercises in laudation, and affectiOn is often tempered with shrewd criticism.
The remaining chapters deal with the Apothecaries, the Matrons, Sisters, and Nurses, the non-medical officers of the Hospital, the Medical School, the present buildings, and last of all the patients from the days of Rahere down to 1911, the year in which Dr. Norman Moore resigned his post as Physician. And this last chapter, with its profusion of anecdotes, strange, touching,beautiful, and grotesque (as that of the sword-swallower), illustrating the " hilarious fortitude of sufferers triumphing over bodily distress," or the simple gratitude of-those who had been restored to health, brings this great labour of love to a fitting conclusion.
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