Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/255

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tastes, a pacific book lover and angler of Izaak Walton's school, soon to be employed in stopping German shrapnel with chest, abdomen and thigh.

Dr. Cushing's conception of his many-sided subject is broad and humane. He is reticent about Osler's intimate personal life during the first forty years, but one suspects that there was not much intimate personal life before his forty-third year. In his English period the sweetness and gentleness of his nature come more and more to the surface, through the rush of professional and social duties, all the way to his own deathbed, on which he jests and takes notes and reads the "Religio Medici." They tell him that he will get well, but he smiles and says to his nurse: "Ah, Sister, we know, don't we?" His chief regret is that he will not be able to see the post-mortem.

The great length of the narrative is partly due to a lax application of the principle of selection among abundant materials, and in so far as that is true it results in a lack of perspective. But the urgent fullness of the work is partly attributable also to Dr. Cushing's brimfulness of every sort of information relevant to the entire life-course of the subject. He knows, for example, for any year you please, the condition of the medical faculty at McGill, Pennsylvania, the Johns Hopkins, Harvard, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. He seems to know who read the important papers at every meeting of every important medical association. He knows the steps in all the great discoveries: the germ theory of disease, the place of aniline dyes in the detection of the tubercle bacillus, the differentiation of fevers, the development of serum therapy and the conquest of malaria, diphtheria and typhoid, the discovery of the Roentgen ray, the ex-