seen, with admiring despair, in Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle." Then many people, when they travel, are neither easy nor happy unless they can afford the luxury of a "medical attendant." Some of the best specimens of medical literature that we have are due to this interesting class of medical men. A Milor on his travels likes a parson, a doctor, and a traveller's major-domo; but the doctor is least easily dispensed with. In this way, by the medical education abroad, by travelling engagements, and by taking appointments on board ship, we have a travelled class of medical men who represent, perhaps, the most interesting, and certainly the most amusing, section of the profession. Wherever in this wide world the medical man goes, he can carry his work with him and his own letter of introduction. The wants which surgery and medicine relieve speak their own vehement, universal language, and stand in need of no interpreter. The lawyer can do no good with his law when once he is out of England. The clergyman must learn the language of the natives, and find his opportunity and his audience. But the medical man speaks the universal language, inasmuch as he answers a universal need. The philosopher and the parson can never be quite sure that they have done any good; the good is so remote and hidden, and it rarely happens that it is ascertained. But the surgeon goes to a man in a state of positive torture, and by a happy bit of carpentering puts him to rights, gives the intense happiness of a sudden cessation from intense pain, and at once earns a thrilling amount of very transitory gratitude. It would be only reciting truisms to speak of the immense generous good they achieve. The amount of self-denying generosity which a physician can practise, and does, is simply incalculable, and there are, indeed, few of us who could not easily furnish a collection of instances.
The curiosities of medical life and practice are endless. If we hear very often of medical men doing arduous work for very scanty remuneration, sometimes there is an agreeable obverse of receiving very splendid remuneration for very scanty services. We know of a medical man whose duty it is to take lunch every day at a great castle belonging to a noble lord. The household is immense; and there is just the chance that there may be some case of indisposition demanding attention. He gets some of the best company and best lunches in England, and duly charges a guinea for each attendance. There is a very wealthy man near a great city, who cannot bear to be left for the night. There is a physician of great ability who drives out of town nightly to sleep at his residence; he is consequently debarred evening society, and if he goes out to dinner he has to leave his friends before wine. He has to charge his patient a thousand a year; and, I think, he works hard for his money. Sometimes the services are such that money cannot repay them. A friend of mine, a young medicus, had a standing engagement of four hundred a year to look after the health of an old lady. She required to be inspected three times a day, and
