Meanwhile Dr. Gull had attained many of the highest honours of the profession. He was one of the first graduates of London University to attain a seat on its Senate, which he continues to occupy. He was Censor of the College of Physicians in 1859-61 and in 1872-3, and Councillor in 1863-4. Oxford conferred on him the degree of D.C.L. in 1868, the Royal Society elected him to its Fellowship in 1869, Cambridge followed suit with the LL.D, in 1880, and Edinburgh in 1884. He was appointed a Crown Member of the General Medical Council in 1871, holding office till 1883, when he resigned. His successful attendance on the Prince of Wales in 1871, in conjunction with Sir W. Jenner, became the occasion of his receiving a baronetcy in 1872, and being made Physician-Extraordinary to the Queen.
The evidence given by Sir William Gull before the Lords’ committee on intemperance, in 1877, has often been referred to as one of the most valuable aids to temperance that a medical man has rendered. He distinctly assigned a subordinate value to alcohol as a medicine, and expressed his belief that its value lay chiefly in its action on the nervous system as a sedative, not as a stimulant. He further stated that a very large number of people in society are dying, day by day, poisoned by alcohol, but not supposed to be poisoned by it. In the case of inebriates, with most patients he would not be afraid to stop the use of alcohol altogether. He sees no good in leaving off drink by degrees. “If you are taking poison into the blood, I do not see the advantage of diminishing the degrees of it from day to day.... I should say, from my experience, that alcohol is the most destructive agent that we are aware of in this country.”
His own example is powerfully instructive. “If I am fatigued with overwork, personally, my food is very simple. I eat the raisins instead of drinking the wine.... I should join issue at once with those people who believe that intellectual work cannot be so well done without wine or alcohol. I should deny that proposition and hold the very opposite.” In the life of James Hinton, by Ellice Hopkins, to which Sir William Gull has contributed a preface, we learn another secret of a popular physician’s endurance in the record of early constitutionals in the parks and remote suburbs, from six to eight in the morning.
In 1882, in the controversy on Vivisection, Sir William Gull, writing in the Nineteenth Century, showed that his sympathy with the struggles of physiologists for their science was combined with a fully answering appreciation of the value of physiological research to medicine. “Yearly in this country,” he says, “more than twenty thousand persons, children and others—mostly children—die of scarlet fever; and nearly twenty thousand more of typhoid fever; and one of the chief causes of this mortality is the high temperature of the blood, which results from the disturbance due to the fever process. No wonder therefore that physiologists and physicians have anxiously and laboriously occupied themselves in investigating that mechanism of the living body which in health maintains so constant a temperature under varying circumstances, both internal and external, and which becomes so easily and fatally deranged in disease.... The febrile state must have arrested attention from the infancy of man. The mothers of a palæolithic age must have watched their children consumed to death in it, as do the mothers of to-day. The name of this fiery state is as old as literature.... This fiery furnace, with its uncounted millions of victims, science hopes to close.”
“There is no doubt that physiological experiments are useful, useful for animals as well as for man. They are therefore justifiable.... Nothing is so cruel as ignorance. For how many centuries had human sufferers to bear pain which is now preventable by better knowledge? How many thousands festered to death in small-pox before the discovery of vaccination? How many are now dying of tubercle and scrofula whom a better knowledge of their conditions might rescue? Yet the pursuit of this knowledge is hindered in England by the outcry of cruelty—the cruelty being no more than the inoculation of some of the lower animals with tubercular and scrofulous matter, in order to study the course of the disease and the modes of prevention. The cruelty obviously lies, not in performing these experiments, but in the hindering of progressive knowledge.”
[CHAPTER XX.]
SIR JAMES PAGET AND SURGICAL PATHOLOGY.
The foremost surgical philosopher and orator of his day, Sir James Paget was called to occupy the presidential chair of the International Medical Congress which met in London in August 1881. This was the culmination of a long career of scientific usefulness and successful practice. Sir James is a younger brother of Dr. G. E. Paget, Regius Professor of Medicine in the University of Cambridge, and was born at Yarmouth in Norfolk in 1814. After a course of professional study at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, Mr. Paget qualified as a member of the London College of Surgeons in 1836. His energy and acuteness were soon made manifest to the authorities, and he was selected to catalogue and describe the Pathological Museums of St. Bartholomew and also of the College of Surgeons, in conjunction with Mr. Stanley. These important works contributed not a little to establish Mr. Paget’s scientific reputation.
In July 1842 Mr. Paget, while Demonstrator of Morbid Anatomy at St. Bartholomew’s, published in the British and Foreign Medical Review an exhaustive report on the chief results obtained by the use of the microscope in the study of human anatomy and physiology; it was afterwards issued separately. Being derived from the original authorities, and full references being given, it was of great value at a critical period in the growth of the knowledge of minute anatomy. For some years Mr. Paget drew up valuable reports on the progress of human anatomy and physiology.
Forty years ago Mr. Paget was already Warden of St. Bartholomew’s College and Lecturer on Physiology in the Hospital. At the opening of the session of 1846 he addressed the students in an eloquent and practical way on “The Motives to Industry in the Study of Medicine.” His appeals to the highest motives were most forceful, and very indicative of the spirit which was to animate himself throughout life. “Do not imagine,” he said, “that your responsibilities will be limited to the events of life or death. As you visit the wards of this hospital, mark some of the hardly less portentous questions which, before a few years are past, you may be permitted to determine. In one, you will find it a doubt whether the remainder of the patient’s life is to be spent in misery, or in ease and comfort; in another, whether he and those who depend upon his labours are to live in hopeless destitution, or in comparative abundance. One who used to help his fellow-men finds ground to fear that he may be a heavy burthen on their charity. Another counts the days of sickness, not more by pain and weariness, than by the sufferings and confusion of those who are left at home without a guide, and, it may be, starving. Oh, gentlemen! I can imagine no boldness greater than his would be, who would neglect the study of his profession, and yet venture on the charge of interests like these; and I can imagine no ambition more honourable, no envy so praiseworthy, as that which strives to emulate the acquirements of those who are daily occupied in giving safe guidance through the perilous passages of disease, and who, in all these various difficulties and dangers, can act with the energy and calmness that are the just property of knowledge.”
About the same time Mr. Paget published an interesting pamphlet containing all the records of Harvey preserved in the Journals of St. Bartholomew’s, with notes elucidating them. Meanwhile, having been appointed Professor of Anatomy and Surgery to the College of Surgeons, an office which he held from 1847 till 1852, the lectures which he delivered being reported in the medical journals, as well as listened to with delight by large audiences, were recognised as among the most masterly modern contributions to surgical science. His prolonged study of the pathological collections belonging to the College and to St. Bartholomew’s in preparing the catalogues, enabled him to illustrate his lectures in a most interesting and valuable manner. The lectures were collected and published in 1853, and have ever since occupied a similar lofty position to the lectures on medicine by Sir Thomas Watson. They illustrate the general pathology of the principal surgical diseases, in conformity with modern advances in physiology. In several recent editions a distinguished pupil of Sir James Paget, Professor Turner of Edinburgh, has revised the lectures from the pathological point of view, while the author has continued to revise them in their clinical aspect.