Licence: In copyright
Credit: Taine's ill-health / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![3-c ( Reprinted from American Medicine, Vol. VIII, No. 19, pages 805-808, November 5, 1904.] TAINE’S ILL-HEALTH. BY GEORGE M. GOULD, M.D., of Philadelphia. His teacher, Vacherot, said of Taine at the age of 22, that he was the hardest worker and the most remark- able student he had ever known at the £cole Normale; that he was prodigiously learned for his age; that he had an ardor and an avidity for knowledge such as his teacher had never before known. Those who have read Taine’s works must have been struck by his marvelous power of absorbing and digesting knowledge, and his ability —he was philosopher, historian, and critic, all in one—to present the systematized results of his erudition with a thoroughness, sympathy, succinctness, and brilliancy rarely, if ever, equaled. Few, however, are aware of the difliculties this great litterateur encountered in carry- ing out his scholarly ideals, his poverty, the opposition of the church and of those envious of his remarkable talents and industry, and particularly the ill-health which like a vindictive fate pursued him so relentlessly! Fven those who may have learned something of these things have probably not an adequate conception of the exact nature and origin of the man’s sufferings and of how they prevented the realization of his aims in litera- ture, which, without the crippled executive ability would have resulted in wonders. Taine was born in 1828, and at the age of 11 “ he had devoured everything in the way of books that came into his hands, especially the classic autliors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” This precocious ripening of his mind and enormous amount of reading hotnnproduced serious evil results to his lealth during adolescence. He was ‘ ‘ somewhat fragile ” at 12 and needed to pick up health and strength at 20 troubles began. The following excernts from his letters and from his biographer’s notes are sufficiently self-explanatory and illuminative of the nature of hit](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22409646_0003.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
