IN A GLASS DARKLY.
TO
BRINSLEY HOMAN, ESQ.
THESE VOLUMES ARE INSCRIBED,
WITH MUCH AFFECTION,
BY HIS OLD FRIEND
THE AUTHOR.
PROLOGUE.
MARTIN HESSELIUS, THE GERMAN PHYSICIAN.
Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have neverpractised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interestme profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from thehonourable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a verytrifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost methe loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful lossof my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldombeen twelve months together in the same place.
In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, awanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast inhis profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary,and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, atleast in what our forefathers used to term “easy circumstances.” He wasan old man when I first saw him; nearly five-and-thirty years my senior.
In Dr. Martin Hesselius, I found my master. His knowledge was immense,his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire ayoung enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight. My admiration has stoodthe test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it waswell-founded.
For nearly twenty years I acted as his medical secretary. His immensecollection of papers he has left in my care, to be arranged, indexed andbound. His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in twodistinct characters. He describes what he saw and heard as anintelligent layman might, and when in this style of narrative he hadseen the patient either through his own hall-door, to the light of day,or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returnsupon the narrative, and in the terms of his art, and with all the forceand originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosisand illustration.
Here and there a case strikes me as of a kind to amuse or horrify a layreader with an interest quite different from the peculiar one which itmay possess for an expert. With slight modifications, chiefly oflanguage, and of course a change of names, I copy the following. Thenarrator is Dr. Martin Hesselius. I find it among the voluminous notesof cases which he made during a tour in England about sixty-four yearsago.
It is related in a series of letters to his friend Professor Van Loo ofLeyden. The professor was not a physician, but a chemist, and a man whoread history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, writtena play.
The narrative is therefore, if somewhat less valuable as a medicalrecord, necessarily written in a manner more likely to interest anunlearned reader.
These letters, from a memorandum attached, appear to have been returnedon the death of the professor, in 1819, to Dr. Hesselius. They arewritten, some in English, some in Fren