“I have constantly read and re-read the work of Graves; I have become inspired with it in my teaching.... The lectures on scarlatina, paralysis, pulmonary affections, cough, headache, have acquired an European reputation.... When he inculcated the necessity of giving nourishment in long-continued pyrexias, the Dublin physician, single-handed, assailed an opinion which appeared to be justified by the practice of all ages, for low diet was then regarded as an indispensable condition in the treatment of fevers. Had he rendered no other service than that of completely reversing medical practice upon this point, Graves would by that act alone have acquired an indefeasible claim to our gratitude.”
“On the other hand, I cannot sufficiently recommend the perusal of the lectures which treat of paralysis; they contain a complete doctrine, and this doctrine has decisively triumphed. The sympathetic paralyses of Whytt and Prochaska have now their place assigned in science, under the much more physiological name of reflex paralyses.”
“Graves is a therapeutist full of resources.... There is not a day that I do not in my practice employ some of the modes of treatment which Graves excels in describing with the minuteness of the true practitioner, and not a day that I do not, from the bottom of my heart, thank the Dublin physician for the information he has given me.”
“Graves is in my acceptation of the term a perfect clinical teacher. An attentive observer, a profound philosopher, an ingenious artist, an able therapeutist, he commends to our admiration the art whose domain he enlarges, and the practice of which he renders more useful and more fertile.”
In 1843 and 1844 Graves was President of the Irish College of Physicians, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1849. He was led by his experience to hold strongly the belief that typhus and typhoid were not distinct fevers. His great service to the treatment of fevers is however independent of this. He recognised the ill effects of a lowering system upon fever patients, and steadily set himself to maintain the patient’s strength by food and stimulants. One day he was going round the hospital, when on entering the convalescent ward he began to expatiate on the healthy appearance of some who had recovered from severe typhus. “This is all the effect of our good feeding,” he exclaimed; “and lest, when I am gone, you may be at a loss for an epitaph for me, let me give you one, in three words:—
“HE FED FEVERS.”
Graves’s papers on Cholera embodied in his Clinical Lectures give an able history of the progress of that disease, and his researches led him to urge the foundation of a complete network of medical observatories to record especially the rise, progress, and character of disease, whether endemic or epidemic. Had he lived he might have done much to promote this object, only now and partially being attempted in the collective scheme for the investigation of disease under the auspices of the International Scientific Congress. But his labours shortened his life. He constantly corresponded with pupils all over the world; wrote much for periodical literature on subjects outside medicine, even doing the literary work of a patient whose family were in straitened circumstances. A disease of the liver finally cut him off, after a protracted illness borne with Christian fortitude and faith, on March 20, 1853.
Having been a leading teacher at Edinburgh for many years, John Hughes Bennett impressed his individuality upon a larger number of students, and has been more generally recognised than Graves as a man of conspicuous merit. As a clinical teacher, as a physiologist, as a pathologist, as a therapeutist, he had high claims. He reformed the treatment both of pneumonia and of phthisis, and identified a disease, leucocythæmia, whose characters have proved the starting-point for most fruitful investigations.
Bennett was born in London on August 31, 1812, and educated at the Grammar and Mount Radford Schools, Exeter. He was fortunate in having a cultivated mother, a lady of independent thought and spirit, and to her he owed the development of his marked literary and artistic tastes. As a boy she trained him in elocution, in which he afterwards excelled, and widened his thoughts by taking him again and again to the Continent.