Memoir of Dr. William S. Forbes / by Frederick P. Henry.

  • Henry, Frederick P. (Frederick Porteous), 1844-1919.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Memoir of Dr. William S. Forbes / by Frederick P. Henry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    in his relations to all, high and low, rich and poor, with, at the same time, a proper sense of the dignity of his social and profes¬ sional standing, his manner was such as to repel the familiarity of the chance acquaintance and invite the confidence of his friends. It was no surface polish. I have seen him under the most various circumstances, and whether presiding as a genial host at his own table or suffering, with stoical fortitude, the seveiest pangs that afflict the human frame, he was a model for imitation. In the hour of death he was serene and undismayed and was literally “ Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.” On the evening of Monday, December 11, 1905, I was sum¬ moned to see him in consultation with his old friend and associate, Dr. Addinell Hewson, and found him suffering from a well-marked attack of angina pectoris, with which he had been seized at the close of his evening lecture. He was speedily relieved; in fact, thanks to the prompt treatment of Dr. Hewson, he was recovering from the attack when I arrived at the house. The next morning we saw him again and found him sitting up and apparently com¬ pletely restored to his usual health. However, he was not deceived as to his condition, but was well aware that, as he expressed it, the “ central organ of the circulation” was at fault. On the fol¬ lowing Sunday (December 17, 1905) I was hastily summoned to his house and found him dead on my arrival. This is the brief story of his last illness. Like John Hunter, Hilton Fagge, and many others whom I might name, he died at his post, and if it is sweet and fitting (“dulce et decorum”) to die for one’s country on the field of battle, how much more so is it to die in the discharge of the duties of a profession whose object is not to destroy the lives of men, but to save them. There is an epitaph of a medieval Spanish scholar1 which sums up the life of a good man better than anything of the sort of which I have knowledge. It is, as a matter of course, in that language to which the scholar instinctively resorts when in search of the 1 Alvaro Gomez de Castro, author of the celebrated biography of Cardinal Ximenez.