He is a surgeon, and was formerly in great repute as a successful practitioner, as well as a lecturer on anatomy, surgery, and the practice of physic.
He was very studious, and chiefly during the night, though his sleep was already sufficiently broken by his professional labour. As a young student he was ambitious to excel, as he would often say, “I employed my time well, that it might serve me in after life; and it did so.”
His mind is naturally one of much greater activity than power, hence his harassing day and night practice and preparation for lecturing induced a morbid state of mind, in which condition a fever in his family occurred. Rapidly and unexpectedly, four male children, a niece, and a maid-servant, were the victims, and this completed the wreck of his overworked, active, and feeling mind.
His present state is most interesting and singular, and very difficult to describe. His activity of mind, prodigious command of words, and most animated and graceful manner, excite the greatest surprise; and even in his present deranged and deluded condition, with his varied stores of information, these exhibitions are mistaken for the remnants of versatility of genius; yet, as I have already said, it is most true that his mind was not naturally one of so much power as it was of amazing ambition and activity.
He will suddenly rush into some of his anatomical, surgical, and medical lectures, going through different parts of the human body, operations, and practice. His lectures on the circulation of the blood, seem to have been most strongly impressed upon his memory. At other times, his eloquence is displayed in imitations of various celebrated characters. If they are ancients, and he be asked, how can this be? since they lived two thousand years ago, he says: “Yes, but I died and rose again in the world.” And thus, he imagines himself every character he personifies, and that at that time he was alive, and afterwards died, again reappearing in such another character. In this way having passed through numberless transmigrations, he was Adam, Abel, or Melchisadeck, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Goliah, David, and Solomon. Solomon had great attractions: frequently describing, with great animation, his state of grandeur and enjoyment. In the same way he was Aristotle, Pythagoras, Confucius, Plato, Zoroaster, Pliny, Ptolemy, Cicero, Demosthenes, and particularly Homer, Mahomet, and even our Saviour, &c. All these he will still personate, and make speeches differing in manner and matter, and suitable in some measure to each of them.