ABSTRACT
How true to Nature, even to their most trivial details, almost every character and every incident in the works of the great novelist whose dust has just been laid to rest, really were, is best known to those whose tastes or whose duties led them to frequent the paths of life from which Dickens delighted to draw. But none, except medical men, can judge of the rare fidelity with which he followed the great Mother through the devious paths of disease and death. In reading Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son, or The Chimes, or even No Thoroughfare, the physician often felt tempted to say, ‘What a gain it would have been to physic if one so keen to observe and so facile to describe had devoted his powers to the medical art.’ It must not be forgotten that his description of hectic (in Oliver Twist) has found its way into more than one standard work, in both medicine and surgery (Miller’s Principles of Surgery, second edition, p. 46; also, Dr Aitken’s Practice of Medicine, third edition, vol. i, p. 111; also several American and French books); that he anticipated the clinical researches of M. Dax, Broca, and Hughlings Jackson, on the connection of right hemiplegia with aphasia (vide Dombey and Son, for the last illness of Mrs Skewton); and that his descriptions of epilepsy in Walter Wilding, and of moral and mental insanity in characters too numerous to mention, show the hand of a master. It is feeble praise to add that he was always just, and generally generous, to our profession. Even his descriptions of our Bob Sawyers, and their less reputable friends, always wanted the coarseness, and, let us add, the unreality, of Albert Smith’s; so that we ourselves could well afford to laugh with the man who sometimes laughed at us, but laughed only as one who loved us. One of the later efforts of his pen was to advance the interests of the East London Hospital for Children; and his sympathies were never absent from the sick and suffering of every age.
