[TO TER EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR:] Sfit,— . 1 am only seventy-five,
so my personal recollections do not go back very far, but such as they are they are at your service. (1) I knew a very interesting old lady, Mrs. Burrows, the mother of Dr. Burrows, physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and his wife, who was a daughter of Abernethy, the great surgeon. She (the old lady) told me that she remem- bered Dr. Johnson, and said he used to visit two ladies who kept a school at Hammersmith. She hated him. Why P I remember he came to the school when cauliflower with melted butter was handed round. Madam, said the doctor, "I think that is a very unnecessary indulgence for young ladies," and when the cauliflower came to him he emptied the butter-boat over his vegetable. I told this story to Dr. Burrows, afterwards Sir George Burrows, physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and to his wife, but like many people, as they did not seek their grandmother's reminis- cences, they never heard of it. I always tell young people to pump any very old people they meet for reminiscences. (2) My father took me to Newton Heath to the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, and I saw Mr. Huskisson killed, when he crossed the line to shake hands in reconciliation with the Duke of Wellington. Lord Wilton, who had studied at the Pine Street School of Medi- cine in Manchester, made a field tourniquet, with a stone tied in a handkerchief and tightened with a stick. Mr. Huskisson was taken to a house in the neighbourhood and there died. (3) At the Reform Bill of 1832, Manchester for the first time had two Members given to it, Mr. Phillips and General Thompson, and I went to the booth with my father to record his vote. The returning officer said, " And for whom do you vote, my little man ? " I replied, " For Phillips and Thomp- son." (4) When there was great distress in Manchester owing to the high price of bread, the Blanketeers marched on London led by a man riding a cow with saddle and bridle and spurs, and I saw the procession from our window at Ardwick. (5) After receiving the rudiments of my medical education at the Pine Street School of Medicine in Manchester, I became the articled pupil of Mr. Lawrence, at St. Bartholo mew's Hospital. As often happens, Mr. Lawrence, afterwards Sir William, the father of the present Sir Trevor Lawrence, had a run of cases which required the extirpation of the eye. It was then the custom to scoop out the whole orbit with its fat and all, a truly terrible operation when there was no ether or chloroform. One day a gentleman who took lodgings in Suffolk Street had heard of something from America by the breathing of which insensibility was produced. Mr. Lawrence had no objection ; and there arrived in a cab Mr. Squire, the chemist, with a large bag. This ether was breathed, and never did it act better. When insensibility had been produced, Mr. Lawrence said, " 11 est comme un cadavre," and every- thing was finished, the whole orbit being cleared, for in those days they knew nothing of snipping the muscles of the eye and leaving the orbit alone. Eventually the operation was completed, and the patient put up his hand and felt a Little trickling from the eye. He awoke, and seeing his son-in-law he said, "Oh, So-and-so, I am glad to see you here; Mr. Lawrence may begin." That produced a never-to- be-forgotten sensation. (6) Mr. D'Israeli, in his early travels in the East, found that the Arabs had the utmost faith in the carbonate of ammonia, then called the sesqui-carbonate, which they derived from the urine of camels. And here I would ask, what keeps the blood-fluid in the veins and arteries ? It is the presence or absence of free ammonia. This remedy was taken up by Mr. Baker Browne, the father of Mr. Lennox Browne, and he discovered and showed that by the administration of ammonia (common smelling-salts) scarlet fever, pneumonia, and other diseases caused by a stasis, or stoppage of the blood in the blood-vessels, could be completely overcome. He wrote a treatise on the treatment of scarlatina, and proved that by the early administration of small doses of ammonia in water, not mixed with anything else, no one need fear scarlatina. I have seen much of this disease, and can confidently corroborate this statement. Any one, however, who goes out of the ordinary line in medicine is called a quack, and that was the fats of Mr. Baker Browne. I learned much from him, and he was the first to perform ovariotomy, which was subsequently taken up by Sir Spencer Wells, who owned Golder's Hill at Hampstead, now bought by the London County Council. But the virtues of ammonia penetrated to Lan- cashire, and in the large soap factory of the Messrs. Thom, who always kept at their works a large barrel of ammonia and water, every woman used to obtain and keep by her a bottle of this fluid sweetened with a little sugar, to administer to any child who got feverish, a sure sign of incipient stasis of the blood. In my hunting days I have saved several horses who got pumped out in running and stood breathless with cold ears not able to breathe, by getting some smelling-salts and mixing it with water, and so administering it. (7) Lastly, I will mention another thing that I was taught by Mr. Raetger, a Hungarian. He collected the blood, say, of a bullock in a barrel, and when the yellow serum floated on the top, he cut it off and left the black blood corpuscules behind. To those he added a little powdered quicklime, mixed it with bran, and preserved it in brown paper bags hung up in the kitchen like hams, and gave some to his young stock of horses, turkeys, and fowls. They throve in a remarkable way, and if others will give some to their domestic fowls with the grain they feed them on, they will see the avidity with which it is consumed and the remarkable effect it has on the birds or on
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