It is curious to find that in 1821 the function of the hospital as a school for students of medicine was something of a novelty. The reform seems to have been due to Abernethy.
In 1845, on 13th May, a unanimous resolution against female governors was carried. Dr Moore adds that “about half a century later they were admitted, and no disastrous consequences have ensued.” In 1851 Miss Elizabeth Blackwell was actually admitted as a student, and strange to say with satisfactory results.
The author relates [154] how he was walking back to St Bartholomew’s one hot summer afternoon when he saw at a small second-hand book shop Paulus Jovius’ history of his own times, printed in 1550. Within it Woodhull the collector had noted that he bought it at the sale of Dr Askew’s books. Next day Sir Norman met Robert Browning and mentioned the book to him: “He had read it, and recalled passages in it, and told most pleasantly how the bishop had concealed the manuscript in a
chest . . . when the Spaniards took Rome, and how a Spanish captain found out that Paulus Jovius valued the manuscript, and so only gave it up on receiving a promise of the emoluments of a living in the gift of the church” (ii., p. 539).
Sir George Burrows became physician in 1841:—“He did not hesitate to express censure where he thought censure required. A clergyman at St Bartholomew’s rather aggressively invited his criticism on a sermon which he had just delivered. ‘Let me tell you, sir,’ said Burrows, ‘that many a man has been put in a lunatic asylum for much less nonsense than you preached to us to-day’” (ii., p. 561).
Dr Frederic John Farre was elected physician, 1854. Farre was captain of Charterhouse School during Thackeray’s first year there. And in The Adventures of Philip the author tells how one of the boys laughed because Firmin’s eyes “filled with tears at some ribald remark, and was gruffly rebuked by Sampson major [i.e., Dr Farre], the cock of the whole school; and with the question, ‘Don’t you see the poor beggar’s in mourning, you great brute?’ was kicked about his business.”
Percivall Pott was elected assistant surgeon at St Bartholomew’s in 1745 and surgeon in 1749, holding office till 1787. There is in the hospital a fine portrait of him in a crimson coat, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. A very old lady, whose mother’s medical attendant had been dresser to Percivall Pott, told Dr Moore, on the authority of the above practitioner, that Pott often came to the hospital in a red coat, and sometimes wore a sword.
Occasional teaching in medicine had been carried out from the seventeenth century onwards, but the originator par excellence was John Abernethy, who was born in 1764 and became a pupil at St Bartholomew’s in 1779. He taught anatomy in a really scientific manner, but he did not succeed in permanently raising it from the region of cram which in my day at Cambridge it shared with Materia Medica.
Many stories are told of his abrupt manner with his private patients. Charles Darwin used to tell us of a patient entering Abernethy’s consulting room, holding out his hand and saying, “Bad cut,” to which Abernethy replied, “Poultice”; the patient departed, only to return in a day or two, when his laconic report, “Cut worse,” was answered by “More poultice.” Finally he came back cured and enquired what he owed the surgeon, who replied, “Nothing; you are the best patient I ever had, and I could not take a fee.”
Sir James Paget was assistant surgeon at St Bartholomew’s in 1847; he became surgeon in 1861; he resigned the position in 1871, and died in 1899. He was the chief surgeon of the Victorian age, and his success may be estimated by the fact that his professional income rose to £10,000 per annum. He freely gave of his store of knowledge, for instance in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions. William Morrant Baker was elected a surgeon of St Bartholomew’s in 1882. He was noted for the neatness of his dress, and Dr Francis Harris, who sometimes wore country clothes, told Dr Moore that