Memorials of John Flint South. Collected by the Rev. Charles
Seth Feltoe, M.A. (John Murray.)—The writer of these Memorials (a nephew of their subject) has executed his grateful task with skill and taste. The career of the distinguished surgeon, who was twice President of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Surgeon to St. Thomas's Hospital, was not a romantic one, but it bad much in it of interest and edification ; and the simple straightforward style of the portion of an autobiography found among his papers, appeals at once to the reader's attention. The book brings back a past phase of social life
in England with vividness, and inspires a sincere respect for the character of Mr. South. It is in some ways painful to read. The familiarity of the surgeon with pain, which in his day there was no attempt to mitigate by anmsthetios, must, we suppose, have inevitably bred contempt—at all events, there is not a touch of feeling for, or even reflection upon the awful amount of human suffering which Mr. South witnessed in his long life. We should not have liked him to gush; but there is something far short of that, and quite different, which is wanting. It never seems to have struck him that there was needless cruelty in those hospital scenes which he describes, where the wretched pauper patients formed the centre of a struggling, striving crowd of students, while undergoing operations hideous even now, but how hideous then one can hardly bear to think. We know what is the hush, what the scrupulous care that surrounds the rich man's bed of suffering ; how jealously the agony and humiliation of " this body of death" which enfolds us is hidden from all eyes but those of devoted friends and well-paid ministrants ; how every moral shock is averted and every moral support applied. Surely the poor had a claim, even in those rougher days, to quiet decency and the suppression of moral torture, in addition to the suffering which science had not yet availed to mitigate ?
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