Horae subsecivae / by Dr. John Brown, with an introduction by Austin Dobson.

  • John Brown
Date:
[1907]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Horae subsecivae / by Dr. John Brown, with an introduction by Austin Dobson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    though his careful and conscientious work was more remarkable than the elegance of his scholarship. It is curious to note that the subsequent author of Horae Siibsecivae preferred drawing to writing, and generally elected to send in the map which was then accepted as the alternative to the short vacation essay. For the rest, he was a frank, popular, amiable lad, though not by any means backward in the perpetual fisticuffs to which Borrow refers in Ch. VII of Lavengro. At this time, as Mr. Lang has not failed to remember, the tall form of Scott was still to be encountered in the Edin- burgh streets, ‘ all rough and alive with power ’—power which, alas ! was soon to be strained to the breaking point in that heroic and hopeless struggle to retrieve the failure of BaUant3me and Co. Little record re- mains of Brown’s school days beyond the famous dog- fights with which he opens the paper on ‘ Rab and his Friends,’ and its casual reference to his chum and school- mate, Bob Ainslie. He remained at the High School until August, 1826, and then, in the following November, entered the University as a student in the Arts classes. His academic career was brief, for early in 1827 he had already entered upon his apprenticeship to James Syme, soon to be, if not alre^y recognized as, the greatest contemporary authority on surgery. Whatever instinct decided his choice of medicine as a profession, it was wise, and, according to his biographer, well calcu- lated to develop to the utmost his essentially compas- sionate nature, his peculiar power of minute observation, and his gift of acute discernment. Of his apprentice- ship, Dr. Taylor Brown tells us little save that, after about five years, he emerged with the full approbation of his master, by whom he was recommended to a medi- cal man at Chatham. He was at Chatham during the cholera visitation of 1832, touching which there is an interesting anecdote. Charles Dickens, speaking once at an Edinburgh dinner party of Chatham, where he had lived in childhood, told enthusiastically, as illustrating the tenacity of Scotch character, the story of a young surgeon, who, when all his colleagues fled
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