Preserve him social, cheerful, and serene,
And just as rich as when he served a Queen.”
About the time of his preferment he made the acquaintance of the great luminaries of art and learning, particularly Swift, (the mad parson as he was first designated) Pope, Gay, Parnell, Atterbury, Congreve, &c., and greatly assisted, with his ready and witty pen, the ambitious Bolingbroke.
What is greatly to his honour, in the midst of an age of scoffers, he retained a deep sense of the importance of personal religion, and seems to have lived in the affectionate esteem and remembrance of his friends; Swift said of him, “Oh! if the world had a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my travels” (Gulliver’s); and on another occasion expresses himself thus, “Arbuthnot has more wit than all we have, and his humanity is equal to his wit.”
For some time before his death he suffered from asthma and dropsy, and bore his affliction with characteristic fortitude and resignation. He died in 1734, leaving a son, who was one of Pope’s executors, and two daughters.
Next to the illustrious Scotchman whom we have just dismissed, comes a very worthy native of the Emerald Isle—Hans Sloane, the son of Alexander Sloane, the head of a colony of Scotchmen, who, in the reign of James I. settled in the north of Ireland. Hans was born at Killileagh, in the year 1660. He very early showed a liking for Natural History, and on his arrival in London attended lectures on Anatomy, Botany, and their kindred sciences, and formed a close intimacy with Boyle and Ray. After four years study he visited Paris and Montpellier, in which places he took his degrees in Medicine. In 1684 he returned to London and commenced practice, being a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the College of Physicians. On the appointment of the Duke of Albemarle to the government of Jamaica he accompanied that nobleman, and thus acquired a rich addition to his Museum of Natural History. George the First created him a Baronet, and on the death of Sir Isaac Newton, he became President of the Royal Society—estimable as a man, and eminent in science, he lived to a great age, and at his decease, bequeathed his museum to the nation, conditionally on the sum of £20,000 being paid to his executors for the benefit of his survivors: this sum bore no proportion to the value of his collection, and as it laid the foundation of the British Museum, it must ever be regarded as a patriotic and generous act.
A curious illustration of the observant mind of Sir H. Sloane is furnished by the fact of his having noticed that the natives of the West Indian Islands, who eat much of the green fat of the turtle, perspired a yellow oil; the explanation being that the true green fat of the turtle is a green-coloured cellular tissue enclosing a yellow oil, which passes through the system undigested. The anatomical data on which this statement is advanced have been, at a comparatively recent period, verified by actual experiments performed by the late Dr. Pereira, assisted by our much esteemed former President, Dr. Daldy. It occurred to my mind that this fact in dietetics might present a lesson of caution to an audience peculiarly exposed, as citizens of London, to the temptation of eating a material, which, however appetising, is incapable of healthy assimilation.
In a sketch of such limited pretension we are compelled to pass over names well deserving a niche in the temple of Esculapius:—every letter of the alphabet furnishes its contingent. To many of the men, into whose labours we have here entered, the civilised world is indebted for their contributions to general literature, as well as to the science of medicine; and in our endeavour to chronicle their importance, we can never cease to admire the fertility of their talents, and the extent of their industry in bringing to light so much useful knowledge out of the scanty materials by which their enquiries were aided:—Akenside, Bacon, Boyle, Blackmore, Cheselden, Darwin, Petty, Ray, among others, may be noted as examples.
We have now reached the period at which legitimate medicine was established in this country; and as my discourse has already exceeded the assigned limits, it remains only to record our solemn tribute of the affectionate remembrance we all entertain towards those members of our society whose faces we shall so sadly miss in our next sessional meetings. Constituted as our cherished society is, as a friendly gathering of kindred spirits, actuated by mutual necessities, meeting as brothers, knowing no rivalry but the desire to impart, each to other, the results of our matured experience, it is with more than ordinary grief that we bow submissively when Providence sees fit to lessen our numbers by death.
But it is not we alone who have sustained a loss. The name of Barlow will live for ages to come as the type of the scientific physician of the nineteenth century. A man of cultivated intellect, of elegant mind and blameless life, of calm judgment and exalted feeling, I look upon his death as nothing less than a calamity to the whole medical profession.