MEDICAL STUDIES
45'
the right side. Still more recently, the idea of consumption being communicated by any form of infection was stoutly denied by English medical men. As to rules of diet, the changes are ludicrous. Robert Frere, one of my fellow-pupils when with Professor Partridge, became through marriage in later years a managing partner in a very old and eminent firm of wine merchants. They had supplied George iv. with his brandy and the like. He told me that the books of the firm showed that every class of wine had in its turn been favoured by the doctors.
There were many incidents that I could tell about this time of my life that might be interesting in some sense, but which are foreign to the main purpose of such an autobiography as mine, which is to indicate how the growth of a mind has been affected by circumstances. I will, however, make one exception, which refers to a very narrow escape from drowning. I had been in a steamboat, crammed with people, to see the Oxford and Cambridge boatrace, and was returning with stream and tide. The arches of Old Battersea Bridge were narrow, and it required careful steering on such occasions to get ., ]y through them. The stettxul~oat on which I was yawed greatly. I was standing behind the righthand paddle-box, when it crashed against one of the piers and split open just in front of me, giving a momentary view of the still revolving paddles. The shock sent me down among them. I was conscious of two taps on the back of my head, and then the water swirled over. me. In a few seconds my wits had gathered themselves together, and I found myself submerged under a mass of wood, which
