A bright social sun henceforth cheered the somewhat sombre atmosphere of my hospital life; for when the day’s duties were accomplished there was always some pleasant social gathering, or some concert or lecture attended with friends, to refresh the medical student. I often walked home from my friends in the West between twelve and one at night (being too poor to engage cabs), not exhausted, but invigorated for the next day’s work. Lady Noel Byron became warmly interested in my studies. I went with her to Faraday’s lectures, visited her at Brighton, and she long remained one of my correspondents.
One of my most valued acquaintances was Miss Florence Nightingale, then a young lady at home, but chafing against the restrictions that crippled her active energies. Many an hour we spent by my fireside in Thavies Inn, or walking in the beautiful grounds of Embley, discussing the problem of the present and hopes of the future. To her, chiefly, I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine, its foundation and its crown.
My acquaintance also with Professor Georgii, the Swedish professor of kinesipathy and the favourite disciple of Brandt, whose consultation-rooms in Piccadilly I often visited, strengthened my faith in the employment of hygienic measures in medicine. When, in later years, I entered into practice, extremely sceptical in relation to the value of drugs and ordinary medical methods, my strong faith in hygiene formed the solid ground from which I gradually built up my own methods of treatment. Looking back upon a long medical life, one of my happiest recollections is of the number of mothers whom I influenced in the healthy education of their children.
Letters written home at this date indicate the vivid interests of the time.
November 1850.
Dear E.,—The great topics of the day here are the Great Industrial Exhibition and Popery.
On November 5 the bells were ringing and the boys hurrahing for ‘Gunpowder Plot Day.’ This anniversary was celebrated with more enthusiasm than usual from the Pope’s having appointed a Cardinal Archbishop of England, and ‘No Popery’ placards are posted everywhere.
The great building of iron and glass for the Exhibition is rapidly rising in Hyde Park, and the papers in this rank-loving country duly inform us whenever Prince Albert comes in from Windsor to inspect its progress, and furthermore that the Prince is modelling a group of statuary, and the Queen designing a carpet, to figure in the display. The last time I was at the Twamleys’ we drove round to see the building, which is a curious sight from the delicate appearance of the immense quantity of iron framework; it looks too fragile to support a crowd, and yet it will hold myriads. There is a splendid old elm tree which they have enclosed in the building, and his great black arms look in strange contrast to the surrounding tracery.
December 24, 1850.
Dear M.,—I was just stretching myself after breakfast, and thinking that I must put on my boots and turn out into the horrible fog that was darkening daylight, when your welcome letters came, and it being holiday time I treated myself to an immediate perusal. I must beg you not to imagine me sitting in a large bare room in an inn. The term ‘inn’ is only applied in this case to a particularly quiet and respectable little street. The term ‘Inns of Court’ means a number of buildings round an open court, withdrawn from the street, entered by an arched passage under some house, and used now or at some former time for law purposes. That was the origin of Thavies Inn; it was formerly a portion of an old law court, and is particularly proper, having iron gates at the archway, which are shut at night, and a porter living in the little house at the entrance, who is always on the look-out for beggars or other un-respectable characters; and the way in which a little barrel organ that has managed to slip in is ‘shut up’ at the first bar has always amused me, and provoked me at the same time. The room also, which was bare enough at first, has assumed a much more homelike aspect since two young friends sent me some pictures to hang on the walls, and a portfolio of paintings, with a little stand on which to place a new one every day; and having turned the sideboard into a bookcase, I can assure you it looks quite comfortable when I have drawn the round table to the fire and settled down for the evening.