His replies, when under the fire of cross-question, were ready and commonsense. Once, he observed that in his opinion sulphuric ether was a safer narcotic than chloroform. Why, then, said a listener, do you not use ether? I use chloroform, he resumed, for the same reason that you use phosphorus matches instead of the tinder box. An occasional risk never stands in the way of ready applicability. On another occasion, after one of the meetings of the “Medical Society,” when the subject of a specific cholera cell had been under debate, some one asked him, as a poser and rather ironically, where he thought the first cholera cell came from? “Exactly,” he replied, with a droll face. “But to begin, do you tell me where the first tiger or the first upas tree came from; nay, tell me where you came from yourself, and I will then tell you the origin of the first cholera cell, and give you the full history of the first case; but I want a model before I venture on the description of ultimate facts.”
As an author, his style was plain, clear, and smoothly elegant. His argument was always carefully studied and as carefully rendered. He sent manuscript to the printer which required scarcely a letter of correction. Both in writing and speaking, he made the expression of truth his first business. Neither provocation nor temptation could ever lead him aside from that principle. His readings were select. He chiefly read scientific works, old and new. He had great relish for some of the old medical writers—the masters in physic. He had read Bacon, but agreed with Harvey’s criticism that Bacon wrote science like a lord chancellor. He had a notion that there had been a history long previous to any we know of from existing records, in which the sciences generally had risen to a greater perfection than they are at this present. His conversance with Sprengel’s History of Medicine had possibly led him to this opinion. He was fond of general history also, but studied it little. He never read novels, because the hours devoted to them were, he felt, hours thrown away. At the same time, he enjoyed as much as any man ridiculous life-pictures naturally cast. When he came to see me, and leisure was with us, I used often to read to him some of the more amusing passages from Dickens and Thackeray, or from one of the older writers, as Swift. It was a new world to him, and provoked great fun. He would ask to have passages read over again, that he might better realize the conception. He enjoyed vastly any anecdotes about the old men in physic, the Cullens and Meads and Arbuthnotts and Harveys. Any such anecdotes he took into his memory and never forgot them.
On such occasions I would, in ridiculous mood, sing him absurd songs to any tune, two or three tunes, or to no tune at all, and without any pretence at voice. At first he would listen with his hands flat together and with a perfect melancholy on his face, as if he could hear it no longer. Bit by bit he would relax, and at last get into a continued laughter. Then I would stop, and he would begin to open out his list of anecdotes, professional and general, upon which the laughter came over to me with compound interest, for of men enriched with stores of droll stories, few could equal him. Nor was he inventive in these narrations; he had simply observed character shrewdly, and described it in its humorous phases. If he had written as he related, he would have ranked as one of the humorists of the age of no second order.
He thought severely of the reviewer’s art, and would never of late review any book critically. If a book were good, it carried the review of its own merits. If it were bad, it were better left untouched. He, at all events, with so much original work before him, could not stop to criticize his compeers or their transactions. Let the dead bury their dead; he must march with the living while life gave power.
Notwithstanding, he was fond of controversy and courted it. I expressed to him once some surprise that he with such an even temper should write so often in controversial style; and that surely it were better to follow Harvey’s and old Sam Johnson’s plan, to do the best oneself, and leave the controversy altogether to others less personally influenced. He agreed that this was by far the best system, but did not think it practicable generally, and feared that silence might often be misinterpreted.
Men who have something in them take different courses in the way of accepting the world’s recognition of their labours. The beginning, in most cases, is after a given pattern; the end is modified and turned about variously, according to the stamp of the man. All start with an exaggerated appreciation of their own doings, and with exaggerated feelings respecting the critics who first notice them. The critic is Jove the all wise, or Pluto the all black. There was never middleman critic yet. Some men stop at the first, either too elated with the pleasure of the first reception to venture more, or too cast down from the pain of a sharp reception to tempt fortune further. Cowards these both, in one word. Others enter into violent controversies; in the heat of the same, drop one or two contradictions, and, wishing every month that Cadmus had been still born, go on always at controversy, boring everybody, and especially those who would believe if not bored. Others, again, soon find their own level, and not only their own, but the level of their critics. Surfeited with commendation, or hardened by attacks, these care little for either, and make no retorts save such as are by ambuscade and go right home. A fourth class, of immovable temper and self-reliant, fall into what seems, superficially, indifference, but which means, deeply, the soul of earnestness. These do always the best thing at the time, and, when it is done to their own satisfaction, put it forward, with no anxiety whatever as to what may be said of it, with no intention of entering into any defence of it, and with no intention of doing anything less than themselves correct all such errors in it as after knowledge may indicate, or commit it to the flames, if destruction be its best fate. Fatalists in letters, men of this class, if it be pleasure to call them so; but great fatalists too—honest reviewers of their own works, who fear their own criticisms, and none other; who offer immense labours, and die to them as they offer. Dr. Snow, as we have seen, was the representative rather of the controversial class of workers. But he had his own way of doing the controversy business, which saved friendships, and exhibited a firm principle and an exact knowledge. It is not to be denied, however, that, had he put his labours before the world, and trusted in them and on the world’s justice, never replying a syllable, he would have avoided an extremity of argument which was often not merely unnecessary in relation to his propositions, but injurious to them, as reasonings overstrained.
He admired art, and felt real pleasure in advancing it. He enjoyed innocent recreations, and was ever at home in the family circle. He had his regrets that he had never married, the fates had been against him permanently on that score. He loved the prattle of children. When he went to court during last season, and had arrayed himself in his court suit, nothing connected with the event amused him so much as the saying of the child of a friend, who, on seeing him start, with his sword and flattened hat, held up her hands, and exclaimed: “Oh! isn’t Dr. Snow pretty, mamma.” The idea of being considered pretty roused in him quite a new and droll sensation, which he could not help telling about as a rare incident in a courtier’s career. The anecdote is simple, but it gives a good idea of the simple and genial nature of the man.
It has been shown that the tendency of Dr. Snow’s mind for philosophical pursuits led him away in some measure from the practical drudgery of professional life. From this fact, it has been too hastily inferred that he was therefore, in the common parlance, “not a practitioner.” Those who knew him as a practitioner, who had had the advantage of his assistance in cases of doubt or difficulty, have a very different opinion. These speak of him, with one accord, as having been, without any ostentation, one of the soundest and most acute of our modern physicians. He had great tact in diagnosis; an observant eye, a ready ear, a sound judgment, a memory admirably stored with the recollection of cases bearing on the one in point, and a faculty of grouping together symptoms and foreshadowing results, which very few men possess. Mr. Peter Marshall, of Bedford Square, who often called in Dr. Snow in consultation, has remarked to me in nearly the same terms as I have expressed, his independent appreciation of Dr. Snow’s practical knowledge. For my part, I never had the good fortune to put many fees into his pocket; but as I had often the pleasure of meeting him on pure scientific grounds in cases of interest, I can bear truthful testimony to his eminent qualities as a practitioner, and to the fact that his philosophical labours only served to render him more intelligent and profound in matters relating to diseases and their treatment. He did not become the idol of the people in common practice, far from it: but the failure arose not from deficiency of knowledge, but from a more perfect knowledge with assumption whipped out of it. It is no discredit to his memory that he was not the idol of the people in common practice, though it cost him much suffering to feel himself kept down, by that wisdom which is the oil to the water of popular ignorance concerning life and its laws. For, to be the idol of the people in physic, is too often to be the Juggernaut of physic,—an idol of wood or of stone in showy gold and tinsel. This idol has neither sense nor force; if it had, it were not an idol; it would walk off, or tell the worshippers no longer to shake hands constantly with themselves in its presence.
But, when the opportunity offered for obtaining remunerative practice by the exercise of his scientific skill, Snow showed himself, both in act and industry, competent for success. He soon overcame all difficulties, and managed by his frugality to lay in store for a rainy day for himself, and to help such friends as needed. Many rumours as to the extent of his gains abound which it is right to correct. His income of late years was near £1,000 a year, but it never exceeded that sum. For this, he exhibited chloroform or one or other anæsthetic about four hundred and fifty times annually, taking an average of the ten years preceding his death. In a large number of these cases, however, his services were gratuitously supplied.
In his private relations, Dr. Snow was a man of the strictest integrity and purest honour. The experiences of life, instead of entwining about him the vices of the world, had weaned him from the world. Without any pretence, maintaining no connection with sect or party, living by the rules of the eternal laws which, according to the best of his abilities, he could read from the universe, he carried out a practical religion, independently of any hypothesis or abstruse profession, which few professors could approach. A child of nature, he knew no way of recognizing the Divine influences so purely as in silent and inexpressible admiration of those grand external phenomena which pharisees see not, but which each moment convey to men of his character, the direct impression of a Power all present and revealing itself for ever.