After the death of his wife, which occurred in 1853, he gradually withdrew from general society, though he still attended the congenial meetings of the Stationers’ Company. The day of his death was, curiously enough, the most important day in the law publishing year—the first day of term—2nd November, 1860. On the previous evening he had given his annual admonition to those around him in business to awake up from the lethargy of the long vacation, and on the following morning it was found that he had passed away, as if in sleep.
For nearly sixty years Butterworth had occupied a leading position as a publisher and as a citizen, and during that period had won the friendship and respect of all who came in contact with him. The alms which his industry enabled him to make were conscientiously, quietly, and discriminatingly bestowed: and the painted glass memorial window erected to him in the choir of the Cathedral of St. Paul’s was a fitting tribute from a very large number of friends and admirers, many of whom had experienced the kindly assistance of his friendship and advice.
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As we have previously seen, divinity and education were among the first subjects to attract a special attention, and works relating to them would otherwise have come within our category of technical books. No sooner, however, were the lawyers fairly supplied with special text-books than the doctors began to clamour for the like, and the publisher who has of all others most zealously administered to their wants is still happily amongst us.
John Churchill was born about the commencement of the century, and was apprenticed in the year 1816 to Messrs. Cox and Son, medical booksellers in Southwark. “The house of business was,” he says, “immediately adjoining Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals, and became the daily resort of the lecturers and numerous students of the schools; I thus early in life became known to the celebrated men of the day, little anticipating that eventually I should become the publisher of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital Reports, and of so large a proportion of the works that issued from the medical press.”
At the time when young Churchill entered the profession of medical publishing, the periodicals, and, of course, the standard technical works, presented a striking contrast to those at present in existence, for now the medical profession assert, with the greatest truth, that their special organs are of far higher intrinsic worth, and of far better “tone” of thought and expression, than those relating to any other purely technical subject. For years, however, after Churchill became a bookseller’s assistant the medical press was only on a par with the papers relating to the other professions, and was chiefly represented by the Medico-Chirurgical Review, founded by J. Johnson in 1820, and the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, a work we have already come across in our notice of Constable. These reviews contained no original reports, no strictures on the hospital appointments then jobbed, like everything else, to men of wealth, family, and interest. In fact, they consisted of little besides long and elaborate abstracts of new books.
On Sunday, 2nd October, 1823, the first number of a journal that was to cause a great revolution in medical literature, and to affect in no slight degree the whole medical profession, was issued from a small publishing shop in the Strand. The journal was, of course, the Lancet, and the publisher young Thomas Wakley. Wakley had walked the united hospitals of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, and had taken his degree in 1817. He does not appear to have practised regularly till, about 1822, he took a small shop in the Strand, and with the assistance, in a pecuniary point of view, of Collard (now the senior partner of the famous piano factory) determined to start a thoroughly independent medical journal. The first number contained a report of a lecture by Sir A. Cooper, printed from memory. The professors and hospital officers fired up, and for long Wakley had to encounter the same difficulties and almost the same penalties which Cave had previously undergone in commencing his reports of Parliamentary proceedings. As a former student, Wakley attended the lectures, and, like other students, was seen to take occasional notes. Cooper could not, however, bring the charge home till he hit upon the device of calling at midnight at his lodgings, and asking to see the “doctor” upon urgent medical business, when he surprised him red-handed correcting a proof-sheet of a lecture. The discovery was so sudden and so undeniable that neither could refrain from laughter; and eventually Cooper, not ill-humouredly, offered to allow his lectures to appear if the proofs were first sent him for revision. Consequently, Cooper, though often criticised in the Lancet, never received a nickname, as did most of the other medical celebrities of the day. For instance, Brodie was known as the “little eminent;” Earle, the “cock sparrow;” Mayo, the “owl;” and Halford, the “eel-backed.”
The Lancet, for many years, was hated by that part of the profession interested in vested rights, and eagerly patronised by general surgeons and students. The language of the Lancet was as violent as the many abuses it attacked could justify; and Cobbett, who was a friend and adviser of Wakley’s, was adopted as a model, while a barrister, named Keen, used to join the party on printing nights to see that the free strictures were not legally liable as libels. An active, though unpaid, member of the staff, was Lawrence, who, however, forsook his reforming principles when once he became a placeman, and was succeeded by Wardrop, whose scurrility, wit, and venom did much in giving the Lancet a lasting reputation for raciness of style and satirical power. They were shortly afterwards joined by Mr. J. F. Clarke, who edited the periodical for upwards of forty years, and to whose amusing and graphic autobiography we are indebted for much of the preceding details. The success of the Lancet soon enabled Wakley to enter Parliament as a representative of Finsbury, and he actually combined together the work of the legislator, the coroner, and the editor, often toiling unremittingly for eighteen consecutive hours.
By the time the Lancet was thus firmly established, Churchill, long out of his apprenticeship, had commenced medical publishing on his own account; and from his famous shop, in New Burlington Street, issued most of the standard works upon the subject; and, encouraged by the success of the Lancet, he determined to make his establishment the centre of periodical, as well as more permanent, medical literature. In 1836, was started therefrom the British and Foreign Medical Review, conducted first by J. Forbes, and afterwards by J. C. Conolly. In 1848, it was merged into the Medico-Chirurgical Review, which, from 1824 to 1847, had been under the editorship of H. J. Johnson. These two were now amalgamated into the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, which, dating from Churchill’s establishment, has acquired a professional standing equal to that of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews in more general criticism. In 1839, appeared the first number of the Medical Times and Gazette, which, under the editorial care of T. P. Healey, and subsequently of J. L. Bushman, has found a very large and influential clientèle.
The medical writers have at present something in common with the early authors. Their works bring them in more remuneration through eventual patronage than from habitual sale, but their patronage is that of all the great public, who are waiting to have their ailments cured. As an instance of the way in which literature may improve the position of a medical man, it is stated by Mr. W. Clarke that, through Elliotson’s clinical reports in the Lancet, his income was raised, in one year, from £500 to £5000. And yet, on the other hand, when he openly gave in his adherence to the newly-imported doctrine of mesmerism, his large public and private practice almost entirely deserted him; and as the legitimate organs were closed to one so abandoned as even to experiment in “the unknown,” he started a medico-mesmeric journal of his own, the Zoist, which was, of course, not published by Mr. Churchill.