186 BRITISH PHYSICIANS. little business might fall to my share as well as possible ; and to banish all thoughts of practising physic as a money- getting trade, with the same solicitude as I would the suggestions of vice or intemperance." These were not mere words of parade : when the success of his practice had ele- vated him to the summit of his career, he still professed, and acted upon the same generous reasoning. " I endeavour," says he, in a letter written several years afterwards, " to follow my business, because it is my duty, rather than my interest ; the last is inseparable from a just discharge of duty ; but I have ever wished to look at the profits in the last place, and this wish has attended me ever since my beginning." In an- other place he remarks, " I wished most fervently, and I endeavour after it still, to do the business that occurred, with all the diligence I could, as a jjresent duty, and endeavoured to repress every rising idea of its consequences such a circumscribed unaspiring temper of mind, doing every thing with diligence, humihty, and as in the sight of the God of healing, frees the mind from much unavailing distress, and consequential disappointment." These familiar effusions of a spirit which cannot be ac- cused of imbecility, or apathy, are the more inte- resting, because few of the distinguished members of the medical profession have bequeathed to us so explicit an avowal of the motives which animated or sustained them in one of the most rugged roads of human travel. In 1748 Fothergill raised his reputation to a great height by his " Account of the Sore Throat attended with Ulcers ; a disease which hath of
