340 BRITISH PHYSICIANS. mind retained its activity almost to the last. He became a living skeleton, and so helpless that he was fed like an infant, yet he would dictate with a faltering voice sentences which indicated no mental feebleness. Once or twice he became de- lirious for a few minutes, and the consciousness that he was so distressed him greatly. His life was prolonged for some days by the constant watching of his medical friends, Mr. George Young and Mr. Fernandez, who relieved each other at his bedside; and by the admirable nursing of his wife, whose health suffered materially by her incessant attentions. On the 16tli of February, 1 830, he breathed his last. Enough has been stated in this brief memoir to show that Robert Goocli was no ordinary man. During a short life, embittered by almost constant illness, he succeeded in attaining to great eminence in his profession, and left behind him valuable contributions to medical knowledge. His Essay on the Plague settled the question of the contagious nature of that disease, at least for the present generation ; and, when the same controversy shall be again revived (for medical as well as theolo- gical heresies spring up again after the lapse of a few generations), will furnish facts and arguments for the confutation of future anticontagionists. The paper on Anatomy in the Quarterly Review for January, 1830, which bears internal marks of being his, and must, of course, have been dic- tated from his death- bed, has placed the question in a right point of view, by proving that it is the interest of the public rather than of the medical profession that the impediments to study of that
