Lecture, introductory to a course, on surgery, in the University of Pennsylvania containing a short account of eminent British surgeons, physicians, scientific and literary men. Delivered October 22, 1847 / By William Gibson.

  • Gibson, William, 1788-1868
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lecture, introductory to a course, on surgery, in the University of Pennsylvania containing a short account of eminent British surgeons, physicians, scientific and literary men. Delivered October 22, 1847 / By William Gibson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    stay in London, to visit, as often as possible, the great Hunterian Mu¬ seum in the College of Surgeons, Lincoln-Inn Fields, where they will find the best arranged and most extraordinary collection of preparations, human and comparative, the world contains—under the care of Pro¬ fessor Owen; a man, for unbounded knowledge in all that relates to anatomy, physiology, comparative anatomy and natural history, with¬ out perhaps an equal; and for high character and gentleman-like de¬ portment universally esteemed and admired. I cannot, my young friends, terminate this address, without again asking your kind indulgence for its many defects, and without remind¬ ing you once more that much of it was written under influences as unpropitious as can well be imagined—in a large saloon generally filled by a hundred people, where the pitching and tossing of the ship, during a gale of three days’ duration, caused the inkstand to fly from the table in one direction and the manuscripts in another, or the clatter of knives and forks and plates, the squalls of children, the screams of women, the loud and boisterous discourse of men, together with the incessant popping of soda water, porter and champagne, and the ever¬ lasting consumption of mountains of fish, roast beef, welsh rabbits and fowls, in a succession of meals administered five times a day, produced a combination of excitement and distress, sufficient to addle the brains, or to make one think all Bedlam had been loosed. It may be easy to conceive Humboldt and Bonpland in a South American swamp, with their bodies and legs doubled up in an oven and their heads protruded at the door, fighting with millions upon millions of mosquitoes whilst they endeavored to make observations and take notes; or some unfor¬ tunate wight of a soldier, during the disastrous Moscow retreat, snugly ensconced, tike a Cossack, in the thorax of a dead carcass of a horse, and there vainly endeavoring to write down with stumps of frozen fingers the emperor’s commands; and yet all this could not very far exceed the position in which I found myself placed, until I had the good fortune, through the kindness of a distinguished literary friend on board, to obtain a state room, nearly as dark, however, as pitch, but still more comfortable and free from noise and clamor than any in the ship. I enter into these details very unwillingly and purely for my own justification, feeling, as I very sincerely cannot help doing, an apology to be due; and hoping that the next lecture, in which I pro¬ pose to lay before you an account of the medical men and institutions of Belgium and Germany, may prove, in every respect, more valuable and worthy of your notice.