SIR BENJA MIN RICHARDSON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.*

A NOTE which follows the preface to this volume contains the pathetic statement that it was finished on November 18th, 1896, just before eight in the evening, and that two hours later the author was seized with the illness which ended fatally on the 21st of the month.

Dr. Richardson was not a physician whose merits were chiefly recognised by his professional brethren. He aimed at popularity and achieved it, not by false pretensions but by his lifelong labours in the service of preventive medi. cine. That his enthusiasm in the cause of national health sometimes overpowered his judgment may be perhaps admitted, but it was a generous enthusiasm, it was based on large acquisitions, and led often to practical results.

Richardson was designed for the medical profession from the cradle, and at school began studying Latin from the Latin pharmacopoeia and from two text-books of medicine. On leaving school he was placed with a country prac- titioner, a custom which, in his opinion, ought never to have been abandoned. Thence he went to Anderson's College, Glasgow, where Livingstone had been a student :- " It was held up to us—such was the proof of his industry— that Livingstone every day walked from the factory at Blantyre where he worked, a distance of eight miles, to the Andersonian classes, and back again in the evening, sixteen miles in all." To this youthful period belongs Richardson's acquaintance with Robert Knox (not John, as he misnames him), the famous anatomist, whose name had the misfortune to be associated with that of Burke and Hare. In his eager- ness to obtain bodies for dissection, Knox not only encouraged the body-snatchers and, as some say, assisted in their unholy work, but was suspected of conniving at the murders which brought Burke to the gallows. A committee decided that there was no evidence against him, and Lord Cockburn warmly defended him at Burke's trial, but Knox was from henceforth a marked man. Great was Sir Walter Scott's indignation when the anatomist proposed to read a paper before the Royal Society of Edinburgh ; but he succeeded in finding students at Glasgow, and Richardson, who was one of the number, declares that there could not have been a more perfect teacher nor a more accomplished man. He knew him many years later in London, where this once " famous anatomical master '' lived in obscurity and poverty.

Dr. Richardson's experiences on the road to fame and fortune were of a varied kind. His great physical strength, his love of sport, his passion for scientific investigations, and his faculty for making friends gave a rare zest to life. Of the last-mentioned gift a curious illustration is given. From an old master of the name of Hudson he obtained an intro- duction to his elder brother, a clever but very eccentric medical man practising in the neighbourhood of Leicester. The "great man" was out upon Richardson's arrival, but he was asked to stay to dinner, and meanwhile gained a certificate of character from two members of the family, a monkey and a parrot. "Jacko seems to get on well with this gentleman," said the man-servant, "and if he does so, the master is sure to fall in. Oh ! he's a knowing one, he is." When Hudson came in he sat down to dinner without a word of greeting to his guest, neither did he look at the note of introduction he had brought with him :- " I have been showing this young gentleman,' Mrs. Hudson explained, some of your curiosities. Jacko has been introduced, and has taken quite a fancy to him ; the parrot has called him Tom and bade him go to bed ; we have had down two of the books, and he has set his eyes on the new microscope as if he wanted to eat it, but of course I dared not meddle with that.' The listener, still eating, now gave a second grunt, with a smile,

and for the first time spoke. Have you shown him the ichneumon ? ' "

And then, after a remark from the guest which the surgeon described as "rot," he was asked to take down an encyclo- pedia and read aloud about the animal. In this odd way a friendship was formed which proved in Richard- son's judgment the turning - point in his career. How long the two worked together we are not told, for Sir Benjamin is not bountiful with dates. Upon leaving the "stocking district" he returned to Glasgow for a while to complete his studies, and then obtained what appeared to be a lucrative partnership at Mortlake. Unfortunately, however, • Vita Medico : Chapters of Medical Life and Work. By Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, M.D., LL.D.. F.R.S. London : Longmans and Co. there was, as the doctor avers, a oonsiderable falling-off in

the practice when the Exhibition of 1851 attracted every one to Hyde Park :—

" The older patients, women especially, had often kept the house for years, and looked upon the visit of the doctor as the event of the day; his visits were a kind of expected right. The Exhibition broke up all such arrangements, and patients who went to it, being greatly taken by it, and in better health than supposed, would not keep to the house as they had done before."

From Mortlake, where he spent a brief period of eager research, Dr. Richardson removed to London, and there he

spent more than forty years of a busy and fruitful life. Much of the research recorded in this narrative is of too distinctly medical a character to be mentioned in these columns, but much also is of a nature which a layman is able

to estimate and to discuss. Sir Benjamin was a dreamer as well as a practical man of science, and so far was he carried by his enthusiasm for sanitation that the reader might be tempted to think he regarded it as the main purpose of existence. He prided himself on having invented the saying, " National health is national wealth," and when, in 1875, he

presided at the meeting in Brighton of the Social Science Association, he startled and amused his audience by describing an imaginary city that was to be built for the sole purpose of keeping out disease. Such a city, if it could be constructed, would demand from every man the care of health as his supreme duty, and nearly everything that makes life attractive would be sacrificed to this single aim. But probably neither Richardson nor the hearers of his address took it more seriously than the author's little

daughter, to whose judgment he had previously submitted it. " The City of Hygeia " was a brilliant jeu d'esprit, which served to enliven the newspapers for some weeks,. and "the subject of health became suddenly quite popular."

Sir Benjamin had also other dreams of sanitary progress. " Upper London," he writes, " was a conception in which I proposed that gardens and pathways should be carried along

the house-tops of this great city, thereby relieving the traffic, and ensuring the means of disposing of the smoke emanating from the fires below." He suggested, too, what is now equally impracticable,—that St. Paul's Cathedral should not be hidden with houses, and that an esplanade and gardens

should be made from it down to the river, which was the original idea and desire of Sir Christopher Wren. Then Richardson proposed a plan of main drainage for London which was to result in draining the whole country by carry- ing sewers along the lines of railway, " with proper intercep-

tions," so that there would not be a house in the Kingdom " that might not get rid of its sewage at every moment, the sewage being distributed on the land for ite own destruction, and the land's nutrition." Nor was this the whole scheme, for Dr. Richardson added that if we could convey sewage from towns on one aide of a railway, we could equally well convey water into towns on the other aide of the line, and this to any distance, " so that there could never be a water- famine anywhere." Another abortive scheme was to have per- manent iron hospitals for the infected sick on the top of houses specially constructed. He proposed that " each of the hos- pitals should have distinct wards and a plan of ventilation so arranged that the air of all of them admitted from below should be drawn through a furnace at the top in which infectious matter could be destroyed by passing through fire." Why this " simple idea " was never carried out excited the projector's wonder. It is impossible even to mention all the sanitary and medical schemes promoted by Dr. Richardson..

Some of them were in the highest degree useful, while a few, like the Oity of Health and his vision of health-camps, belong to the dreamland of Utopia.

It is pretty safe to say that no period of medical history

has witnessed greater changes than the years of which Dr. Richardson writes this full and instructive record. In the earlier years of the century, bleeding, cupping, and the appli- cation of leeches were remedies familiar to every doctor. That the lancet did often save life Dr. Richardson does not doubt, and why the use of it became so suddenly unpopular he find*

it difficult to say. The periodical bleedings Dr. Johnson protested against were common, and one of the author's

friends, in buying a practice, had to pay specially for " spring and fall venesection." Cupping was a remunera- tive art, and Dr. Richardson knew a firm of doctors who paid £250 a year to one house for the leeches they

required. If these uncomfortable operations did not suffice to reduce a patient's strength, mercury in the form of calomel was always at hand, and if that did not answer, antimony in the form of tartar emetic sufficed to palsy the system. "The action of the heart was reduced and the pulse extremely lowered. Sometimes it even seemed as if patients died from the treatment, and they always were brought into a state of debility from which they slowly recovered." A greater and still happier change in the healing art was the discovery of Anesthesia, which has not only removed a terrible agony and dread, but has saved innumerable lives that must otherwise have perished. Surgeons, as well as patients, feared the operating-day, and he was thought the greatest surgeon who had the swiftest hand. Dr. Richardson observes that he scarcely ever saw tears shed during an operation, and the sufferer, however feeble, rarely, if ever, fainted except from loss of blood. " Did I feel faint ?" was a man's reply to the doctor's inquiry. " What a question to ask ! Did I feel faint ? Why, of course I didn't ; neither would you, if you had had the same reason to keep you from fainting. It was a good deal too bad for that." The author adds : " The most treasured day in my life is that day when I witnessed for the first time the physical miracle of the abolition of pain daring a surgical operation."

Sir Benjamin Richardson's record of his career touches on many topics for which we have no space. He was, as is well known, an ardent total abstainer, and regarded alcohol as an enemy to life ; he "leant strongly towards the vegetarian movement;" he considered that smoking "stupefies the mental organs, deranges the blood, impairs the circulation, weakens the digestion, and stunts the growth ; " he advocated the parochial establishment of workshops ; he invented a lethal chamber for the painless death of dogs and other animals ; he was a warm advocate of small hospitals ; he lectured on dress from a physician's point of view, and strongly condemned mourning ; he maintained, "as zealously as possible," the work of the Aerated Bread Company ; he travelled over England in order to write a medical history of the country ; he invented the metal dustbin "now so popular; " and there was, in short, scarcely a reform, possible or im- possible, in sanitary science that did not find an advocate in Sir Benjamin Richardson. His autobiography deserves to be widely read. It is a pity that the author's son, who introduces the volume with a note, did not supply an index.