Mr. Abernethy had, in his last illness, repeatedly expressed his anxiety that every kindness and care should be shown towards her to whom he felt so much indebted; and he had prophetically suggested, as probable, what really happened. He said, "Take every care of your dear mother. She may have many and perhaps serious illnesses; but she will still be, most likely, a long-lived woman." This legacy, we have reason to know, was most fully and kindly administered.
One circumstance, on the occasion of his marriage, is very characteristic of him: namely, his not allowing it to interrupt, even for a day, a duty with which he rarely suffered anything to interfere—we mean the lecture at the hospital.
Many years after this, I met him coming into the hospital one day, a little before two (the hour of lecture), and seeing him rather smartly dressed, with a white waistcoat, I said:
"Ay," said he; "one of the girls was married this morning."
"Indeed, Sir!" I said. "You should have given yourself a holiday on such an occasion, and not come down to lecture."
"Nay," returned he. "Egad! I came down to lecture the day I was married myself!"
On another occasion, I recollect his being sent for to a case just before lecture. The case was close in the neighbourhood, and it being a question of time, he hesitated a little; but being pressed to go, he started off. He had, however, hardly passed the gates of the hospital before the clock struck two, when, all at once, he said, "No, I'll be —— if I do!" and returned to the lecture-room.
OF ABERNETHY'S BOOK ON "THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORIGIN OF
"From the barr'd Vizor of Antiquity Reflected shines the Eternal light of Truth, As from a mirror; all the means of action, The shapeless masses, the materials, Are everywhere around us. What we need Is the celestial fire, to change the flint Into transparent crystal, bright as fair."
In all that Abernethy had hitherto published, it was easy to perceive that, although he was carefully examining the prevailing opinions and practice of the day, he was emphatically one of those independent thinkers who had power to overlay the most established conventionalisms with opinions of his own. Although hitherto his publications had related to particular diseases or accidents which were held as within the ordinary province of the surgeon, he was shadowing forth _principles_—views which, if they were true, must necessarily have a much wider range of application than to the particular cases which it had been his object to consider. In 1804, he had sufficiently matured his general views to think it right to publish them; and this he did in his book on the "Constitutional Origin of Local Diseases," popularly known as the "My Book," to which he not unfrequently referred his patients for a more detailed account of his views, than he could find time to give in the consulting room. When we reflect that diseases consist entirely of altered conditions in the structure or function of some part of the body, a formal announcement that they must be greatly influenced by the organs on which _the whole body depends_ for its nutrition, seems to have so much the aspect of an obvious truism, that we scarcely know whether most to wonder at so formal an announcement of it having been necessary, or the astonishing number and variety of the reservations with which it has been admitted.