Page:Lives of British Physicians.djvu/73

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HARVEY. hi it became quite white. He is represented to have been, like the rest of his brothers, very choleric in his temper, and in his younger days to have worn a dagger, which he would be apt to draw upon slight occasions. But when he grew up to man- hood, and during his long hfe, he had the cha- racter of being candid, cheerful, upright — living on terms of great harmony with his friends and brethren, showing no spirit of rivalry or hostility. He was as little disposed by nature to detract from the merits of others, as to make an ostenta- tious display of his own. The many antagonists whom his renown and the novelty of his opinions excited, were in general treated with modest and temperate language, frequently very different from their own, and while he refuted their arguments, he decorated them with all due praises. He was a great martyr to the gout, and his method of treating himself was as follows : — He would sit with his legs bare, even if it were frosty weather, on the leads of Cockaine House, where he lived for some time with his brother Eliab, or put them into a pail of water, till he was almost dead with cold, and then he would betake himself to his stove, and so it was done. He was troubled with insomnolency, and would then get up and walk about his chamber in his shirt, till he was pretty cool, or even till he began to shiver, when he would return to bed and fall into a sleep. He and his brother, who was a Turkey merchant, drank coffee, before coffee-houses came into fashion in London. His visits to his patients he made on horseback with a foot cloth, his man following on foot, in the same way in which the