INDEX 307 EMINENT DOCTORS. CHAPTER XI. _ADDISON, BRIGHT, AND THE DISEASES WHICH BEAR THEIR NAMES._ Operative dexterity, as was natural, arrived more quickly at perfection than did medical treatment. In fact, no one will pretend that medicine has yet travelled far, in comparison with its future achievements, when physiology, pathology, and therapeutics shall have become more complete. THOMAS ADDISON is a specimen of the physicians of genius who have adorned this century. He is known as the discoverer of a disease which bears his name; but his true fame rests upon his practical talent in diagnosing disease. Dr. Lonsdale, in his volume of “Worthies of Cumberland,” issued in 1873, shows that Addison sprang from the ranks of the yeomanry of Cumberland, and that his forefathers resided during the Commonwealth at “The Banks,” in the parish of Lanercost. Thomas Addison, born in 1636, and Mary his wife, have left their initials carved on an old oaken settle still preserved at The Banks, inscribed with the injunction, “When God doth thee in store, remember thou the poor.” One of his descendants was a Samuel Addison, who became a doctor of medicine, but died at the age of thirty-four. Thomas Addison, a nephew of his, was born in April 1793, at Longbenton, near Newcastle-on-Tyne, where his father was in business, though he retained his farm at The Banks, where his wife lived for the most part. Young Addison clung greatly to the ancestral home, and many years afterwards assembled his wedding guests there. It is on the very site where the Romans encamped during the building of the wall to the Solway Firth; it overlooks the medieval Priory of Lanercost; near by is Naworth, the old Border castle of “Belted Will Howard.” Thomas Addison was educated at the Newcastle grammar-school under the Rev. E. Moises, and there became a masterly Latin scholar, so that he afterwards took his lecture notes in Latin at Edinburgh. He went direct from school to Edinburgh University, declining to enter as a pupil with an Edinburgh doctor, as his father desired. He was no ordinary student. Independent in thought and action, he was soon recognised by the Royal Medical Society, and made one of its presidents in 1814, an honour which Marshall Hall, and Richard Bright his subsequent colleague, also attained about that time. A striking fact it is that three of the first names of great English physicians of this century should be Edinburgh students, and Presidents of the same Medical Society there. But as yet the London medical schools were only in embryo.