hat
Pott often came to the hospital in a red coat, and sometimes wore a
sword.

Occasional teaching in medicine had been carried out from the seventeenth
century onwards, but the originator _par excellence_ was John Abernethy,
who was born in 1764 and became a pupil at St Bartholomew's in 1779. He
taught anatomy in a really scientific manner, but he did not succeed in
permanently raising it from the region of cram which in my day at
Cambridge it shared with Materia Medica.

Many stories are told of his abrupt manner with his private patients.
Charles Darwin used to tell us of a patient entering Abernethy's
consulting room, holding out his hand and saying, "Bad cut," to which
Abernethy replied, "Poultice"; the patient departed, only to return in a
day or two, when his laconic report, "Cut worse," was answered by "More
poultice." Finally he came back cured and enquired what he owed the
surgeon, who replied, "Nothing; you are the best patient I ever had, and
I could not take a fee."

Sir James Paget was assistant surgeon at St Bartholomew's in 1847; he
became surgeon in 1861; he resigned the position in 1871, and died in
1899. He was the chief surgeon of the Victorian age, and his success may
be estimated by the fact that his professional income rose to 10,000
pounds per annum. He freely gave of his store of knowledge, for instance
in Charles Darwin's _The Expression of the Emotions_. William Morrant
Baker was elected a surgeon of St Bartholomew's in 1882. He was noted
for the neatness of his dress, and Dr Francis Harris, who sometimes wore
country clothes, told Dr Moore that he occasionally hid in the porter's
lodge to avoid Baker's critical eyes. He warned Dr Moore (who was a
candidate for the Wardenship of the College) that those same eyes were on
him in the matter of dress.

Sir William Church, who wrote on the Hospital Pharmacopoeia, gives some
astonishing facts. From 1866 to 1875 the annual consumption of sulphate
of magnesia was 42.5 hundredweights, _i.e._, about two cart-loads. "In
1836 8.75 tons of linseed meal were used, while from 1876 to 1885 the
annual average was 15.75 tons, but in 1911 the poultice was so nearly
obsolete that 3 cwt. sufficed. In 1837 96,300 leeches were used; . . .
in 1868 the number had sunk to 2200. . . . It is now (1911) about 700"
(ii., p. 714).

Chloroform first appears in the apothecaries' ledger on 22nd November
1847, just one week after the publication of Sir James Y