The late Mr. Abernethy / [John Abernethy].

  • John Abernethy
Date:
[1831]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The late Mr. Abernethy / [John Abernethy]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    2/16 page 182
    THE LATE MR. ABERNETHY. The influence which the name of Abernethy has with the public at large, is such as to have always created an eagerness to know what he ate and drank himself, and what he generally recommended, as if all classes of persons, all modes of life, and all constitutions required to be nourished upon the same plan. The absurdity of this notion has been well pointed out by Dr. Paris in his Treatise upon Diet, in which this learned physician accommodates his precepts to individual circum¬ stances, without laying down a general rule. The public are apt to run after systems of diet as they do after cures, and religiously ab¬ stain from proscribed dishes and drinks, or adhere tenaciously to such as have received the stamp of approbation from some distinguished medical writer; so that any great medical authority may find it as easy to expel a certain article of diet from common use, or introduce another, as Swift did, by virtue of his name, to persuade the people that an expected eclipse of the moon was put off by order* of the Dean of St. Patrick ! We know an instance of Christmas turkeys and sausages having been peremptorily forbidden to enter the house again after the appearance of Sir Anthony Carlisle^’s imbecile book upon diet and old age ; and the savory little side-dish of minced veal, long a favorite with the lady of the house, was ordered to be discontinued, until the period arrived when she had no teeth to masticate more solid substances. At this moment the public are deceived by supposing that a certain biscuit, abhorrent to our olfac¬ tory and gustatory senses, was the favorite breakfast and luncheon of Mr. Abernethy, whose name it bears, because the honest baker who invented it was called Abernethy, as many of our northern neighbors are. We venture to affirm, no such trash ever entered the worthy professor’s stomach, and we know that what are called tops and bot¬ toms were his choice, sometimes soaked in tea or eaten dry. Those therefore who have eaten ‘Abernethy biscuits’ more upon principle than inclination, had better follow the example of a good old lady of our acquaintance who took a year or two’s supply of ‘ Scott’s Pills’ over again, because during that period she discovered, from the result of an action at law, that she had been taking not the real ‘ Scott’s Pills,’ but sundry boxes-full of a forged and spurious source of di¬ gestion in imitation of the true Scott. The fact is, that Mr. Aber¬ nethy was a man of common sense, with all his eccentricities and enthusiasm when upon his hobby, and usually fed like other people, though perhaps a little more cautiously than the generality. He used to enforce his precepts for the benefit of those who were invalids, and such as exceeded in diet, and pointed out that which we all must acknowledge to be true, that the indulgence in luxurious living is a common vice, leads to disorders of health, and tends more or less to shorten the duration of human life. Few persons in the history of modern medicine have enjoyed so widely spread a reputation as the subject of this brief memoir. In his own profession as a surgeon, he was estimated most highly, on account of his long and ardent devotion to his art, which he strove to improve wherever doubts and difficulties offered themselves. His views of surgery were perfectly philosophical, although marked by a charac-
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image