Reade's private life, with
which, whether they have the right or not, the public will concern
itself. So at home is he on every subject that each appears to be his
specialty. One asserts that he follows Galen: witness his mania on
medicine. Certainly not, another replies; are not his principles
erroneous, and second-hand at that? Does he not dredge the science with
ridicule? No practitioner would gravely assert the feasibility of
transfusion, an operation never yet performed with success, since the
red globules of his own blood seem to be as proper to each individual as
his identity, and allow no admixture from alien veins; in surgery he has
but one foe,--phlebotomy; in pharmacy, but one friend,--chloroform; he
asserts of Dr. Sampson, (Dr. Dickson, the writer of "Fallacies of the
Faculty"?) that "he was strong, but not strong enough to make the
populace suspend an opinion; yet it might be done: by chloroforming
them." (Which leads one parenthetically to remark that it is great pity,
then, that, in the prevalent headlong precipitancy of public judgment,
anaesthetics have not been more generally employed on this side of the
water of late.
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