THE LATE DR.. MARSHALL Ti A T,T, • • Memoirs

of Dr. Marshall Hall, M.D., PHA By his Widow. Bentley, IT is painful to have to criticize a grievous literary failure which is evidently the product of very strong feeling on the part of its author, and which gives us materials for deciphering the character of a very good and benevolent as well as a very acute and distinguished man. Mrs. Hall has been sadly ill-advised by her own and her husband's friends. The strong attachment which she supposed a qualification for her task may, under certain circumstances, be the greatest dis- qualification for it, and it is so in her own case. When we have said that all who can really read this book will carry away with them a sincere esteem for Dr. Marshall Hall's simple and benevolent cha- racter, and a true admiration for isis practical genius, we have said all that we can say in its praise. Very few will be able to read it. Many who take it up will lay it down with hasty disgust at the lavish testi- monializing which pervades it from beginning to end. Those who do succeed in sifting some coherent account of Marshall Hall out of the mass of biographical rubble with which it is crammed will associate it with a confused pile of materials selected with little judgment and no taste by the blind partiality of an amiable woman who wrote to all sorts of people for their impression of her husband, and printed their answers without asking herself whether they contained any impression after all. This would be bad enough without the addi- tional confusion produced by the attempt to 'combine a scientific memoir with a delineation of character. But when we have first a layer of domestic traits, then a stratum of dissected frogs and excito- motory nerves, then raw impressions of Alpine scenery and religious emotions, then another layer of physiology or-sewk,fre philosophy, and all interspersed in the most unpleasant way with incoherent letters from admiring friends, or from American newspapers mention- ing how full the theatres were at Dr. Marshall Hall's casual lec- tures in the United States, and how attentive the audience, a re- sult is produced which constitutes one of the very worst bio- graphies we ever had occasion to read, though it concerns a thoroughly high-minded as well as a distinguished man, and is in- spired by a very genuine, but ineffectual, wish in a venerating wife to paint him as he is: It was a very great mistake to confound the various purposes for which the story of an eminent scientific man's career is recorded. When once a man has really distinguished him- self in any way, no doubt the public are anxious to know something of his general character and life ; but if his reputation be purely scientific, they will be best pleased with a clear bat brief outline of his private life and character. They do not want to know where he spent all his vacations, whether he admired Mont Blanc or Niagara the most, and what each individual niece, and friend, and patient, thought about him. In such a case, what really answers the. purpose best is a brief memoir prefixed to a scientific edition of his most valuable writingm, edited with any explanations that the case may require by a brother labourer. Sometimes if, as rarely happens, a scientific man's career is also memorable in its general incidents, such a sketch may be extended into a volume ; but what can never answer any purpose is to mix up inextricably scientific detail with a more general delineation, so that the scientific reader is encumbered with irrelevant humanities, and the general reader embarrassed with technical science. Mrs. Hall has overlaid a chaos of not very intelli- gent friendly panegyric with a second chaos of technical dissertation, and occasionally so completely forgets the biographer in the phy- sician's wife, that she describes her husband's disease in the most painfully professional way, telling us, for instance, that the " dqla- tition" was difficult, or that "the violent exacerbation of dye- phagia from cold" was passing away. What the professional satis- faction may be in using technical terms in such cases, instead of expressions that all mankind understand, it is, perhaps, only given to medical intellects to explain. A careful study of the volume does, however, enable us to disinter from beneath the sandy mounds of indiscriminate eulogy which it contains some distinct image of Dr. Marshall Hall, and an image which is very expressively reflected in the speaking engraving prefixed to this volume. Possibly Mrs. Hall may not clearly recognize all the features which we seem to discern, but as they are all consistent and

noble in their kind, though not quite so regularly perfect as his vene- _

rating wife would have us believe, we shall attempt to construct something of a character out of this characterless heap of rude

materials. It is obvious that Dr. Marshall Hall was never quite so popular

among his professional brethren as his single-minded nature and great scientific originality deserved to make him. On the Continent and in America his fame was widely spread; but in London, and therefore in England, social circumstances, or rather his fixed dislike to the mael- strom of London society., gave him a slightly unpopular and strait-laced reputation. He was rigid and literal in his religious notions, refusing, for example, at considerable personal sacrifice, to take an oath even in a court of justice, because he thought it forbidden by the words of Christ; but this vein of narrow pietism was not, in him, grafted, as it so often is, on a shrewd worldly nature, but on a very simple and generous one. There was nothing in him of that most unpleasant of all mixtures of moral qualities, saintly cunning. But he had intense benevolence mid piety in one cabinet of his mmd, and keen scientific interests in the other; and there was no humour, no broad human insight, nothing of general range of intellect to connect and unite the two. In early youth there is an old-fashioned stiffness, and profusion of didactic virtue about his letters to his father and sisters, which we should, at first sight, call priggish, until we gain a better insight into the real structure of his character, and see that the total absence of any sense of humour, and the concentrated intensity of his interests in one narrow field, render natural in him what would have been atrocious conceit in any ordinary young man. For example, there are few men of twenty-three who could write in the following strain with- out laying themselves open to the suspicion of pedantry at least, which in young Marshall Hall it certainly was not :

"September 20th, 1813.

" My dear Father—The real pleasure I enjoy in writing to you has always one alloy. I can never answer your letters—or rather, I ought to say, I can never answer those models of exce llence which it is your constant kind care to place before me. When you bestow praise, I always fear lest I should not deserve it; when you set before me some new excellence, I always lament that I shall never be able to attain to it ; yet will I always try; and though my ruling passion be ambition, yet it shall be the ambition of being good as well as great. If numerous good resolutions could make me so, I should not be undeserving to be called your son. I confess, however, my resolutions are too transitory, and sometimes, in the moments of despair, I look forward to the time when I shall spend some time at Basford, full of the determination to profit more than I have done by good ex- ample. In the mean time let me enjoy the pleasure of hearing from you fre- quently. Another ecliptic will soon be traversed, and then I hope to see you all again. Tell Sarah the leaves that were green and the flowers that bloomed when I was at Bestial, have now begun to fade and disappear, marking one of the periods that were to transpire before my return. They were to wither, to be buried in snow, to bloom again, and again to wither before my return. So she expressed, and so I have retained and sealed in my memory words that flowed from her heart."

The peculiar baldness with which Marshall Hall's piety and warm- heartedness and moral reflections are always expressed, not only in his youth but throughout life, is very often observable in men whose real thinking powers are uniformly directed to purely technical spheres, so that they speak on such subjects with only half their minds, as we may say ; and that, not the reflective hid!. There is scarcely a trace in the whole of this biography that Marshall Hall really took any deep interest in any one subject of which man, in his higher capacities, was the object. He does not seem to have had any literary or any proper political interests, though his extreme benevolence interested him deeply against slavery; the nervous system was to him far more than the British constitution; the whity-brown matter in the brain more than the noblest poetry or thought which the mind produced; and the ganglia in the spine of greater interest than the centres of revolutionary activity in Europe. There is not a trace in these memoirs of his having taken any deep interest in the great French war, which was contemporary with his youth; of his having ever taken up a novel of Sir Walter Scott's, though much of the popular effervescence with which they were received must have been contem- porary with his residence in Edinburgh; of any interest whatever in the great political movements which preceded and produced our Reform Bill; or in any subsequent events of like public nature. The only mention we have of European battle-fields throughout this book, dated August, 1849, is eminently characteristic :

"My reader will not be surprised that with all these questions in my mind, I should meditate a journey as far as the seat of the Austrian and Hungarian warfare, with the view of observing tetanus in the wounded of those battle- fields."

In fact the whole power of his intellect was concentrated on one focus—medical theory, especially the spinal nervous system. To this he devoted himself with curious and narrow intensity. If he wakened at night, he lighted his candles and wrote or read upon it. He scribbled books and pamphlets upon it in his carriage as he went to Visit hiti patients. He experimented on it in the evening, never ac- cepting invitations to spend his evenings in society; and with the Intensity of genius succeeded in interesting his wife nearly as much in reflex action, and the excito-motory system of men and frogs, as himself. If he went abroad he was sure to lecture upon it as often BS he could find a scientific audience to hear him. There were few great cities, where he stayed at all, where he did not demonstrate and lecture on his favourite subject. In Feria, in Rome, in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, &c., and even in Havannah, in Cuba, he proclaimed Ins spinal gospel with great effect. During the duller parts of his continental excursions—the sublimer parts he appears to have enjoyed With all the simple enthusiasm of a boyish love for nature—he was still writing in his voiture about the reflex action of the spinal nerves. Ile was in fact the missionary of the third system of nerves, and he ajed aloud until he had persuaded the world—his own countrymen

being of course the last to believe in their own prophet—that his dis- coveries were true and important.

The intensity of Dr. Marshall Hall's self-devotion to acience was combined, as we have said, with the most unworldly generosity, and a piety which tended to pietism. It is related of him that before his marriage Ile left all his consulting-fees without examination on the table of his consulting-room, trusting to the lady of the house in which he lived to come down and lock them up for him, when he had driven out to visit his patients. After he married he left all his income to the management of his wife, saying he had enough to do to earn the money, and he could not be troubled with spending it. The scrupulous anxiety with which he attended the poor, and those from whom he declined to take any fee, seems to have been remark- able even among physicians, who are very frequently noted for benevolence. But like all men of missionary temperament, he was exceedingly firm and resolute to exclude what he thought needless drafts upon his strength and health. Not only did he refrain from all evening visiting, to which possibly his religions views may have somewhat disinclined him, but he soon declined all night practice

in his profession, which he found very injurious, and felt he might leave to younger men.

One of the most curious illustrations of the scientific enthusiasm of Marshall Hall's character, and of that baldness of moral feeling which, as we have said, so often belongs to a warm heart when the intellect is exclusively concentrated on non-human interests, is to be found in his letters to his boy. There we see, in distinct layers the father's wish to see his son a good and Christian man, and his wish to interest Lim in chemistry and physiology. All the originality of the father's mind is absorbed in the latter subjects; and the eager impulses of his piety have to content themselves with the oddest ejaculatory out- bursts, which look as if they were laid on in .jets by turning a moral cock. A lesson on parallax and vanishing lines suddenly terminates in a text about the atonement ; we begin with oxygen and end with salvation; or start with the atonement and end with Cuvier's opinion of medicine, in the strangest way. The following letter may serve as a fair example :

"14, Manchester-square, June 3rd, 1896. "My dear Boy,—I wish you to look about and find the poorest and most afflicted person or persons in Ventnor, and to distribute amongst them . . . "I consider the aged, the decrepit, the sick, the blind, the lame, as the most proper objects of chanty in general, and bread the best form of it, though money is the most convenient form and the most prized. Education consists not in cultivating the understanding alone; but the heart also. I would have my boy excel in both. You have a nice little inherit- ance, and you must do good with it. A purely selfish person is the object of my abhorrence. . . .

"When the tadpole grows into the frog, it rites in the scale of life, and requires more oxygen. If it cannot get out of the water it is drowned!

"Every change in animals is from a lower to a higher state of existence; that is, every anatomical change; physiological changes, as. in hibernation, may be from higher to lower.

" I have a beautiful theory on this subject, which I will explain in a future letter, if you wish it.

" How beautiful is science How beautiful is Nature, whenever she is under- stood! And how much nobler is the mind occupied with the search into her areanfi, than that which is engrossed with vulgar things! "I will send you the planaria another day. How are your tritons going on ? "Remember my words—that Christ died to save sinners, and that all are sinners.

"I particularly wish you not to dispute about religion (or indeed anything) with any one. "There is no religion in disputing; disputing is the sign of no religion, gene- rally speaking.

" We shall look for a long long letter from you.—Your most affectionate father,—MARSHALL HALL."

There is something touching in this correspondence with his son, in spite of the very bald inarticulate tone of the piety, as soon as we perceive—as we cannot help perceiving—that it is intensely genuine

and earnest, though so entirely beyond the range of his intelketual life. It is almost pathetic to observe how the man's mind is divided

into two utterly distinct hemispheres—the intellectual never touching the moral and religious, the moral and religious never touching the intellectual—and the two asserting themselves alternately.

We cannot venture in these columns—even were we qualified— to descant on the professional and scientific achievements of Dr. Marshall Hall, but they were really of the highest class. His discovery of the third system of nerves, which carry on all the reflex or involuntary processes of the nervous system, being inde- pendent of both sensation and volition, and which continue to take place after the head is severed from the body, if the nerves, which carry impressions to the spine, and bring back motive power from the spine, are left undivided, was one of the great stages in scientific phy- siology the importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated. Nor was it with Dr. Marshall Hall a barren scientific discovery. He followed it into practical medicine, discovering, by the powerful action of strychmne on the spinal system of frogs, that one great remedy for weakness in this part of the nervous system was strychnine in small doses. His second great discovery was, that drowned people and still-born children might often he brought to life by keeping up for a time an artificial respiration, so as to expel the poisonous car- bonic acid gas from the lungs, and put the atmospheric air in ifs place. By this method persons apparently drowned, or poisoned by narcotics, have been recovered after all other remedies have fade ci. The Humane Society's method is said never to succeed after an immersion of more than three or four minutes. Dr. Hall's has succeeded after an immersion of a quarter of an hour. In one case of narcotic poisoning artificial breathing was kept up for many hours, and the patient recovered by that means, when he must otherwise have died from mere suffocation. These were great discoveries,—the one concerning the nervous system both

theoretic and practical,—the other concerning the recovery of the suf- focated only practical, yet due to one of those simple and bold appli- cations of theory which require a powerful grasp of theory. In fact, a method to which it is due that many infants live and grow up

• in this world, who would never otherwise have uttered even a cry here, could only be due to a man whose scientific intellect was auda- cious as well as acute.

We lay down this book with a renewed expression of regret that so striking, and in its way so picturesque a subject, should have been so ineffectually handled. This active, benevolent, intense-minded man of few but haunting ideas, with his warm heart, and vehement textual religion, sent into the world to announce the spinal system to mankind, and fulfilling his mission even on his death-bed, might have made a very remarkable portrait. But few will exhume it from beneath the clumsy pyramid of testimonials that we have before us.