Medicine -- Anecdotes; Physicians -- Great Britain
One of the drollest love stories in medical ana is that which relates
to Dr. Thomas Dawson, a century since alike admired by the inhabitants
of Hackney as a pulpit orator and a physician. Dawson was originally a
Suffolk worthy, unconnected, however, with the eccentric John Dawson,
who, in the reign of Charles the Second, was an apothecary in the
pleasant old town of Framlingham, in that county. His father, a
dissenting minister, had seven sons, and educated six of them for the
Nonconformist pulpit. Of these six, certainly three joined the
Established Church, and became rectors--two of the said three,
Benjamin and Abraham, being controversial writers of considerable
merit. Thomas Dawson adhered to the tenets of his father, and,
combining the vocations of divine and physic-man, preached on Sundays,
and doctored during the rest of the week. He was Mead and Mead's
father in one: though the conditions of human existence, which render
it impossible for one person to be in two places at the same time,
prevented him from leaving chapel to visit his patients, and the next
minute urging the congregation to offer up a prayer for the welfare of
the unfortunate sufferers. Amongst the doctor's circle of acquaintance
Miss Corbett of Hackney was at the same time the richest, the most
devout, and the most afflicted in bodily health. Ministering to her
body and soul, Dr. Dawson had frequent occasions for visiting her. One
day he found her alone, sitting with the large family Bible before
her, meditating on perhaps the grandest chapter in all the Old
Testament. The doctor read the words to which the forefinger of her
right hand pointed--the words of Nathan to David: "_Thou art the
man_." The doctor took the hint; and on the 29th of May, 1758, he
found a wife--and the pious lady won a husband. The only offspring of
this strange match was one son, a Mr. Dawson, who still resides at a
very advanced age of life in the charming village of Botesdale, in
Suffolk. When the writer of these pages was a happy little boy, making
his first acquaintance with Latin and Greek, at the Botesdale Grammar
School, then presided over by the pious, manly, and gentle ----, he
was an especial pet with Mr. Dawson. The worthy gentleman's little
house was in the centre of a large garden, densely stocked with apple
and other fruit trees; and in it he led a very retired life, visited
by only a very few friends, and tended by two or three servants--of
whom one, an ancient serving man, acted as a valet, gardener, and
groom to an antique horse which constituted Mr. Dawson's entire stud.
The small urchin before-mentioned had free access at all times to the
venerable gentleman, and used to bring him the gossip of the town and
school, in exchange for apples and other substantial gifts. Thin and
attenuated, diminutive, so as to be little more than a dwarf, with
vagrant eager eye, hooked as to his nose, and with a long beard,
snowy-white, streaming over his waistcoat, the octogenarian used to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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