The collector : essays on books, newspapers, pictures, inns, authors, doctors, holidays, actors, preachers / by Henry T. Tuckerman ; with an introduction by Dr. Doran.

  • Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Date:
[1868]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The collector : essays on books, newspapers, pictures, inns, authors, doctors, holidays, actors, preachers / by Henry T. Tuckerman ; with an introduction by Dr. Doran. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/378 (page 7)
    had been only a gentleman, he, the French author, would never have thought of calling upon him at all. A wicked wit, some hundred and odd years ago, made the early pages of Sylvan.us Urban lively by inventing a census of surviving English authors. These he set down in round numbers at three thousand, who had produced in the preceding year, of abortive works, 7,000; born dead, 3,000; and not one that survived the year itself. Three hundred and twenty perished by sudden death, and a few thousands went to line trunks, make sky-rocket cases, hold pies, or were consumed by worms. One thousand of these literary gentlemen are said to have died of lunacy, a rather greater number were ‘ starved,’ seventeen were hanged, fifteen committed suicide, five pastoral poets died of fistula, others in various ways ; while a difference was suggested as to the diet, lives, and deaths Of aldermen and authors in a zero, indicating the number of writers who died of ‘ surfeit.’ Perhaps one of the most singular reasons for founding a periodica], and undertaking much of the authorship and editorship, presents itself in the case of the celebrated French physician, Theophraste Renaudet. Fie had a number of nervous, anxious, restless patients, who required little more than to have their minds drawn from the unprofitable occupation of dwelling upon the condition of the body. The great doctor did not wish that the thoughts of his patients should be allowed to dwell very much upon anything. Books of science, politics, or polemical theology, were not at all what he required. The romances of the day were stilted, pompous things, quite as difficult for invalids to read as any of the inflated treatises on scientific, political, and theological subjects. Renaudet