t fifteen, Brown-Sequard, with the physical appearance of an Indian
Creole, was clerking in a colonial store by day, and composing poetry,
romances and plays by night. The call of Paris was in his blood, which
was indeed a supersaturated solution of wanderlust.

Soon he was landed there to make his fortune in literature, only too
speedily to be disillusioned. Exhibition of manuscripts to a leading
literary light merely evoked curt advice to learn a trade or go into
business. He would have none of either and studied medicine instead,
earning his way by teaching as he learned. In the laboratories, he
made the acquaintance of people who more than once were to be his
salvation in the ups and downs of his career. In 1848 he was one of
the secretaries of the Society of Biology, newly founded by Claude
Bernard.

Some trouble, perhaps some effect upon his health of cholera which
then swept Paris, caused him to return to his native Mauritius, to
encounter an epidemic of cholera. There he slaved manfully, for which
a gold medal was afterward struck for him. That over with, he embarked
in 1852 for New York, without a word of American, learning English on
board. This was the first of a series of voyages. As he often boasted,
he crossed the ocean sixty times, not a bad record for the days when
the _Mauretania_ was still in the womb of time. He made a hopeless
failure out of practice in New York, became so poor as to practice
obstetrics at five dollars a case, and married a niece of Daniel
Webster. Then he went back to Paris. Back to America next as Professor
of Physiology at the University of Richmond, Virginia, a job occupied
for a few months only because of his opinions on slavery, ostensibly
anyhow.

To Paris then the rolling stone meandered again. So that soon after he
was offered and accepted the charge of a great newly opened hospital
for epileptics in London. That proved merely an interlude and in
1863 we find him back in his fatherland (if we may hold France his
motherland) as Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard. In New York
fame preceded him now with a thousand trumpets, so that on the day of
his arrival, he was kept busy seeing patients until night, when he
had to desist because of exhaustion. But still he did not prosper. An
unfortunate second marriage almost broke his heart, and an attempt
to found in New York a new medical periodical, the _Archives of
Scientific and Practical Medicine and Surgery_, got him into ho