and every month he used to select and copy out under the proper titles of the diseases, whatever he thought particularly worthy to be recorded. In the year 1782 he employed himself in digesting this register into the form of a volume of Commentaries on the History and Cure of Diseases, with a particular resolution never to depend on his memory for any material circumstance that he did not find expressly written down in his notes. These commentaries were entrusted to the care of his son, Dr. W. Heberden, to be published after his death. We find in them a greater mass of valuable matter, accurately observed and candidly related, than in almost any other volume that has ever appeared upon a medical subject.
It has been remarked, that the more experience a physician acquires in his profession, the more he is in general inclined to approach to the opinions of Heberden, and the more he is compelled to esteem his writings.
He possessed a singular combination of modesty and of dignity of character. He was not only a well-informed and accomplished scholar, but a man of the purest integrity of conduct, of mild and courteous manners, distinguished by genuine piety and by unaffected benevolence of heart. He bought a sceptical work, left in manuscript by Dr. Conyers Middleton, of his widow, in order to destroy it[1]. He was at the expense of publishing another work of the same author, on the Servile Condition of Physicians among the Ancients, as well as an edi-
- ↑ Having discovered that a publisher would give 150l. for the work, he presented 200l. to the widow, and committed it to the flames.
