Sir Andrew could not be judged of by the surface. As Sir Joseph Phayres truly says: "I have known him intimately, and the more I knew him the more I respected and admired him." Those who knew him best loved him best. One has only to read how one leading man after another writes of him with enthusiastic appreciation (in the Medical Journal) to learn what his colleagues thought of his medical skill and personal character.
A bishop recently spoke of him as the truthful doctor: and a young girl, who from a small child had stayed with him, told me he would always correct himself if he had told an anecdote the least inaccurately; and one day this summer when walking round their garden with him she said the caterpillars had eaten all their gooseberry trees; "I mean the gooseberry leaves," she added. Sir Andrew immediately said, "I am glad you are particular to say what is exactly true"; but, she added, there was always something to remember in everything he said. With regard to another point, a clergyman who knew Sir Andrew very intimately once told me that "No man of this century had a more keenly religious mind; he was so saturated with thoughts of God and so convinced that God had spoken to man. He was intensely religious, with a profound sense of the supernatural; he certainly was a great example to very busy men in the way he always managed to find time for church, and even when called away to a distance he would, if possible, go to a church near where he happened to be." In addition to these qualities, he was very just, sympathetic, and generous.
I have come across many friends who knew him well, and it is interesting to note that the same cardinal points seem to have struck everyone as the key-notes of his life. In almost identical words each one speaks of his strong faith, his strict veracity, and his intense devotion to duty. One of his old friends said to me the other day: "Nothing would tempt Clark away from what he thought right; his conscientiousness was unbounded."
His love of metaphysics, combined with a very high motive, made him naturally interested in the whole man—body, mind, and spirit. To quote the words of a well-known bishop: "It was his intrepid honesty which was so valuable a quality. In Sir Andrew Clark men felt that he wished to do them good, and to do them the best good, by making men of them."
The bishop told me a characteristic anecdote illustrating this: "A clergyman complained to him of feeling low and depressed, unable to face his work, and tempted to rely on stimulants. Sir Andrew saw that the position was a perilous one, and that it was a crisis in the man's life. He dealt with the case, and forbade resort to stimulants, when the patient declared that he would be unequal to his work and ready to sink. 'Then,' said Sir Andrew, 'sink like a man!'" This is but one of many incidents showing his marvellous power in restraining his patients and raising them to a higher moral level. The writer could tell a far more wonderful story of the saving of a drunkard, body and soul, but it is too touching and sacred for publication. At the top of the wall of that well-known consulting-room (in which Sir Andrew is said to have seen 10,000 patients annually), immediately facing the chair where he always sat, are the words: "Glory to God."
With regard to his profession he was an enthusiast. He termed medicine "the metropolis of the kingdom of knowledge," and in one of his addresses to students, said: "You have chosen one of the noblest, the most important, and the most interesting of professions, but also the most arduous and the most self-denying, involving the largest sacrifices and the fewest rewards. He who is not prepared to find in its cultivation and exercise his chief recompense, has mistaken his calling and should retrace his steps."
He had an ideal, and he did his utmost to live up to it. His words in many instances did as much good as his medicine.