Page:Lives of British Physicians.djvu/259

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

BAILLIE. 239 tive and thinking practitioners will here find facts which will furnish them with the true causes of many phenomena they have observed ; they will often find explanations that they had long wished for ; and some will meet with facts, which, instead of agreeing with favourite theories, will serve in the strongest manner to refute them." Meckel, the most distinguished living anatomist in Europe, in the fasciculi of Morbid Anatomy which he has recently published, is perpetually citing the text and plates of Baillie, and has clearly derived more information from this source than from any other. Indeed no one can form a just notion of his power of compressing his subject matter without compar- ing his treatise with the more voluminous ones which had preceded it on the same subject : there is scarcely a pathological fact in the enormous tomes of Bonetus, Lieutaud, and Morgagni, which is not to be found in the small and unpretending manual of BaiUie. In the second edition he made a valuable addition of the Symptoms, but the drudgery of extensive practice, which gradually overwhelmed and oppressed him after the age of forty, prevented him from making any further important improvements. About four years after the appearance of this manual, he began to publish his " Engravings," illustrative of it: these plates reflect equal honour on the editor, the draughts- man, and the engraver; in beauty they have never been excelled. Mr. Clift, the Conservator of the Museum of the College of Surgeons, ought to be mentioned as the artist of the drawings. In his twenty-ninth year Baillie married Sophia, the second daughter of the eminent Dr. Denman,