Doctors out of practice / by J. Cordy Jeaffreson.

  • Jeaffreson, John Cordy, 1831-1901.
Date:
[1884]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Doctors out of practice / by J. Cordy Jeaffreson. 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.

    45/49
    BY J. CORDY IEAFFRKSON, AUTHOR OF “a BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS.' '■HI. WRATH, GRANDEUR, MARRIAGE, AND MYSTERY.—(Continued.) UR. JAMES HAMILTON. [From Kay/x Edinburgh Portraits. IN the survey of the honour that has come to medi cine in the persons of its celebrated practi tioners or their families, account must be taken of the doctors who have married into noble houses, and also of the doctors whose children fought their way into the peerage or acquired nobility by wedlock. Sir Lucas Pepys married the Coun- tess de Rothes; Sir Henry Halford married a daughter of the eleventh Lord St. John of Bletsoe ; and the farcical Sir John Hill became the son-in- law of the scarcely less eccentric and farcical Lord Ranelagh. Sir Hans Sloane’s two surviving daughters passed by wedlock into the noble houses of Stanley and Cadogan, Elizabeth carry- ing her father’s Chelsea estate to the second Lord Cadogan, whose title has become the familiar name of the property. Marrying the niece and heiress of Sir Charles Saunders (whose surname he assumed on the occasion of the marriage), Dr. Huck, of St. Thomas’s Hospital (1768—1777), bequeathed his great wealth to his two daughters, the elder of whom (Anne) became Viscountess Melville just four years before the younger (Jane) became the Countess of Westmoreland. Of eminent physicians whose sons placed them- selves amongst the peerage and founded houses that bid fair to survive to future centuries, two of j | the most remarkable cases were Antony Addin 1 ton, already celebrated in these papers, and E Denman, of Mount Street. Partly because was only a doctor’s son, a fact ever remember:] to his discredit by his political opponents, a J partly because he had himself prescribed I soporific pillow of hops for George the Thin relief in 1-801, Henry Addington (in due corn Viscount Sidmouth) was nicknamed “The Dc tor by those who hated him for being Prank More fortunate in winning greatness by mea that did not provoke ungenerous reflections his want of ancestral nobility, more fortune, also in the moral endowments that never fail render their possessor acceptable to the worr Dr. Thomas Denman’s son ennobled a family tl is peculiarly associated with what is brightest a. most honourable in recent medical annals. Fi: cousin, on his mother’s side, to Sir Benjairi Brodie, the eminent surgeon, the first Lord DeJ man was by the marriage of his two sisters broth in-law to the famous physicians, Sir Richd Croft, Bart., and Dr. Matthew Baillie. Whilst some of our Georgian doctors mat', themselves with women of ancient lineage, othe were fortunate in winning heiresses of commerc ancestry. One of these ladies (Miss Corbett,. Hackney) fell into the hands of Dr. Thon Dawson, a gentleman acceptable to the Disst ters of George the Third’s London alike as physician and a preacher. A doctor on wr days and a pulpit orator on Sundays, you Thomas Dawson was still in the freshness of religious enthusiasm and personal comelinn when he found this lady of unusual goodness < many thousands sitting by herself with the Bi open before her. It may have been an accid that the Book was open at the page where Natl says to David, “ Thou art the man.” It r; have been an accident that the lady’s fore-fin called her visitor’s attention to these partial words. Accidents sometimes influence the cot I of man for good or evil. Anyhow, the circt stances that may have been accidental determi the young physician forthwith to drop upon right knee and make a request which the weal] Miss Corbett thought well to grant. In living happily with the lady who surrendel herself to him under circumstances at the stl time so droll and so serious, Dr. Thomas Daw II was more fortunate than poor Dr. Cadogan 11 George the Second’s London, whose dome II troubles were matters of sympathetic and hun j ous interest to his many fair admirers in I western quarters of the town. A Fellow of | Royal Society, as well as the College of Physici ll Dr. Cadogan had the wit to animate and the lc I