On the 19th July 1827 his beloved brother-in-law and assistant, John Shaw, died. His suffering from this loss was intense. In his discoveries, his first great object had always been “to convince Johnnie.” This faithful brother-in-law was fortunately replaced by another, Alexander Shaw, afterwards surgeon to the Middlesex Hospital, notable in after times as a defender of his fame and expounder of his doctrines. In the same year was matured the project long incubating, of a new London University (now University College), in which Charles Bell was to be the head of the Medical School. He delivered the inaugural lecture, and for some years took an active part in its organisation. The arrangements, however, which were made by the governing body were in many respects inconsistent with the high ideal of teaching which Charles Bell had, and with the freedom of procedure to which he had been for so many years accustomed at the Windmill Street School. Consequently in 1830 he finally retired from the new College, and felt in some respects stranded, for discovery and teaching were his very life. Practice was to him an irksome necessity. Thus a time of life in which practical success might have made him wealthy was characterised by depression and sadness, principally relieved by a very unusual recreation for a hard-worked London practitioner, namely, fly-fishing. He was first attracted to this sport by spending a day at Panshanger with his bosom friend, John Richardson. The evident delight of his friend in this occupation, and the freshness and relaxation which it afforded, convinced him that he had found the thing he wanted to sweep from his mind the cobwebs of professional life. Lady Bell says, “He was often on the waterside before sunrise—indeed, before he could see his flies; and he did enjoy these morning hours. I came down with his breakfast, bringing books and arrangements for passing the whole day, even with cloaks and umbrellas, for no weather deterred us. He liked me to see him land his fish, and waved his hat for me to come.” In the intervals of angling many of the best parts of his popular works on the Hand and on Animal Mechanics were written.

In spite of the feelings of disappointment which oppressed him severely on some occasions, it must not be imagined that he was predominantly unhappy. Lord Jeffrey described him as “happy Charlie Bell;” Lord Cockburn wrote: “If I ever knew a generally and practically happy man, it was Sir Charles Bell.” Alexander Shaw said of him: “His mind was a garden of flowers and a forest of hardy trees. Its exercise in profound thought gave him high enjoyment; yet he would often avow his pleasure in being still a boy, and he did love life and nature with the freshness of youth. I therefore repeat—if ever I knew a happy man, it was Sir Charles Bell.” Yet, seeing that he was convinced, “that the place of a professor who fills his place is the most respectable in life,” we may believe that a painful sense of ungratified desire was largely present if not continually expressed. In 1835 he writes: “My hands are better for operation than any I have seen at work; but an operating surgeon’s life has no equivalent reward in this world... I must be the teacher and consulting surgeon to be happy.”

In 1831, in connection with the accession of William IV., the Guelphic order of knighthood was conferred on several distinguished men of science, among whom Charles Bell was included. His association with Herschel and Brewster in this honour was gratifying and appropriate. A complete school of medicine was now projected in connection with the Middlesex Hospital, in which he was to take a prominent part. It had not, however, passed through three complete months of its history, when the Town Council of Edinburgh elected Sir Charles[19] to the Chair of Surgery in the University, and the offer proved attractive enough to induce him to leave London. He had always cherished the idea of a return to Edinburgh at some future time, and it appeared to him that there was a possibility of a sphere of more elevated usefulness there, than he could now hope for in London. Moreover, his heart was in Scotland, in the streets of Edinburgh—in the theatre where Monro had lectured to him—in the society of his old friends Jeffrey, Cockburn, William Clerk, Adam Ferguson, and most of all his brother George. “London is a place to live in, but not to die in,” he said. “My comfort has ever been to labour for some great purpose, and my great object of study has been attained.... There is but one place where I can hope to fulfil the object of my scientific labour, and that is Edinburgh; and that is an experiment.”

Successful as his classes were in Edinburgh, and influential as his position speedily became, it must be acknowledged that the experiment was a failure, for it did not give him the satisfaction he had hoped. Practice in Edinburgh could not possibly yield what London did, and the emoluments of the University chair did not counterbalance this. Some coldness, too, was shown him on the part of his fellow-professors. It was an old case of Scotch undemonstrativeness. “I have had a German professor to breakfast,” he writes, “who brings me a volume from Paris—they make me greater than Harvey. I wish to heaven the folks at home would make something of me. I thought, in addressing the new-made doctors at the conclusion of the session, that I had done well; but not one word of approbation from any professor, nor has one of them in all this time called me in to consultation, except when forced by the desire of the patient.” His income, never very considerable in Edinburgh, diminished considerably. “I put down my carriage with as little feeling as I throw off my shoes,” he says; but when in 1842 a Government proposal appeared likely to end in the extinction of the privileges of his beloved University, his excitement was unbounded. He set off for London as soon as he could. But he was attacked by a spasm of the stomach so severe as to threaten his life. He hastened on towards London, but while at Manchester, assisting at an operation, he thought he should have been obliged to lie and roll on the carpet, or leave the room in the midst of it. On Wednesday April 27, 1842, Sir Charles and Lady Bell reached Hallow Park, the seat of Mrs. Holland, near Worcester. Looking on the winding Severn and the distant hills, he said to his wife: “This is a novel spot; here I fain would rest till they come to take me away.” Here he sketched an old yew-tree, some sheep, and the river; then two children and a donkey. As he went back he looked with his observant eye at every shrub, commented on the birds’ notes, and gathered up their feathers for his flies. After dinner the same evening he gave graphic sketches of medical celebrities he had known, admired and discussed an engraving of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, and was altogether so happy in mood that he said to his wife: “Did you ever see me happier or better than I have been all this forenoon?” yet he had been several times that day in imminent danger of death from the dread malady that John Hunter had, angina pectoris. We cannot refrain from quoting the account of his end (Letters, p. 400): “The evening reading that night was the 23d Psalm; the last prayer, that beautiful one, ‘For that peace which the world cannot give,’ and then he sank into a deep and quiet sleep. In the morning he awoke with a spasm, which he said was caused by changing his position. His wife was rising to drop his laudanum for him, but calling her to him, he laid his head on her shoulder, and there ‘rested.’”

No more appropriate tribute has been paid to Sir Charles Bell than that in the Edinburgh Review for April 1872. The writer says (p. 429): “Never passed away a gentler, truer, or finer spirit. His genius was great, and has left a legacy to mankind which will keep his name fresh in many generations. But the story of his life has a more potent moral. It is the story of one who kept his affections young, and his love of the pure and the refined unsullied, while fighting bravely the battle of life; whose heart was as tender as his intellect was vigorous and original who, while he gained a foremost place among his fellows, turned with undiminished zest to his home and his friends, and found there the object, the reward, and the solace of his life.”

He was buried near the yew-tree he had so lately sketched in Hallow Churchyard. A plain stone, with his name, dates of birth and death, and the line, “The pure in heart shall see God,” marked the spot. A tablet was afterwards placed in the churchyard, with an inscription written by his lifelong friend Francis (Lord) Jeffrey. Part of it runs thus: “Sacred to the memory of Sir Charles Bell, who, after unfolding with unrivalled sagacity, patience, and success, the wonderful structure of our mortal bodies, esteemed lightly of his greatest discoveries, except only as they tended to impress himself and others with a deeper sense of the infinite wisdom and ineffable goodness of the Almighty Creator.” His letters, edited by his widow (1870), are a lasting memorial of his beautiful and noble nature.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] In December 1835.

[CHAPTER IX.]
MARSHALL HALL, AND THE DISCOVERY OF REFLEX ACTION.

The character of Marshall Hall, who divides with Sir Charles Bell the principal honours of discovery as to the nervous system, presents a contrast to his in that it displays a mind more minutely active, and more distinctly medical in its tone, combined with a marvellous degree of detailed benevolence. Thus Hall’s reputation has, like Harvey’s and John Hunter’s, grown largely since his death. Marshall Hall was born at Basford near Nottingham on February 18, 1790, his father, Robert Hall, having been a cotton manufacturer and bleacher of ingenuity and originality. He first employed chlorine as a bleaching agent on a large scale, his earliest attempts having procured for his establishment the epithet of “Bedlam.” He was of a very religious turn, too, being one of the early Wesleyans. The strict but benevolent piety of his father, and the sweet and gentle disposition of his mother, were favourable to the growth of high morality, strict conscientiousness, and amiability of character in their family, while the inventive ability of the father reproduced itself in his second son, Samuel Hall, a prolific inventor, and no less in his sixth son, Marshall. It is not often that a typically good and inoffensive son has turned out so conspicuously original in his work. But he had a saving fondness for boyish literature such as Robinson Crusoe, and was full of fun and playfulness. He was early sent to Nottingham to school with the Rev. J. Blanchard, the instructor of Kirke White. Here he did not even learn Latin, although his elder brothers had had classical instruction. French appears to have been his only linguistic attainment: and the chief fact recorded of his school-days is his thrashing a tyrannical “big boy” in the school. But school was over for him at the age of 14, and he was placed with a chemist at Newark. Soon finding his position irksome, his friendship with a youth who was preparing for a medical career led him to long for a similar course, and ultimately his father was induced to send him to Edinburgh, whither he went in October 1809. He had already indicated his future eminence by rising very early to study medicine and chemistry, and giving as his reason: “I am determined to be a great man.”