In his medical practice he was by some accused of empiricism. From this charge, both Miss Seward and Mr. Edgeworth have, I think, justly vindicated him. The former has recorded a project which he suggested, on the supposed authority of some old practitioners, but which he did not execute, for curing one of his consumptive patients by the transfusing of blood from the veins of a person in health. I have been told, that when a mother, who seemed to be in the paroxysm of a delirium, expressed an earnest wish to take her infant into her arms, and her attendants were fearful of indulging her lest she should do some violence to the object of her affection, he desired them to commit it to her without apprehension, and that the result was an immediate abatement of her disorder. This was an instance rather of strong sagacity than of extraordinary boldness; for nothing less than a well-founded confidence in the safety of the experiment could have induced him to hazard it.
I know not whether it be worth relating, that when sent for to a nobleman, at Buxton, who conceived his health to have suffered by the use of tea, to which he was immoderately addicted, Darwin rang the bell, and ordered a pot of strong green tea to be brought up, and, filling both his patient's cup and his own, encouraged him to frequent and lavish draughts. I have heard that he was impatient of inquiries which related to diet; thinking, I suppose, that after the age of childhood, in ordinary cases, each person might regulate it best for himself. But from an almost entire abstinence from fermented liquors, he was, both by precept and example, a strenuous adviser. "He believed," says Miss Edgeworth, in her Memoirs of her Father, "that almost all the distempers of the higher classes of people arise from drinking, in some form or other, too much vinous spirit. To this he attributed the aristocratic disease of gout, the jaundice, and all bilious or liver complaints; in short all the family of pain. This opinion he supported in his writings with the force of his eloquence and reason; and still more in conversation, by all those powers of wit, satire, and peculiar humour, which never appeared fully to the public in his works, but which gained him strong ascendancy in private society. During his lifetime, he almost banished wine from the tables of the rich of his acquaintance; and persuaded most of the gentry in his own and the neighbouring counties to become water-drinkers." Here, I doubt, Miss Edgeworth has a little over-rated the extent of his influence. "Partly in jest, and partly in earnest, he expressed his suspicions, and carried his inferences on this subject, to a preposterous excess. When he heard that my father was bilious, he suspected that this must be the consequence of his having, since his residence in Ireland, and in compliance with the fashion of the country, indulged too freely in drinking. His letter, I remember, concluded with--Farewell, my dear friend. God keep you from whiskey--if he can."