These lectures had the largest sale of any similar work in the author’s lifetime. Five large editions were published under his own revision. He most unsparingly altered his previous views with the advance of science, and showed rare modesty in his expressions thereupon. Dr. Charles West has admirably sketched his friend’s character (_Medical Times and Gazette_, Dec. 16, 1882): “He laid no claim to genius; he made no great discovery. Though a scholar he was not more learned, though a good speaker he was not more eloquent, than many of his contemporaries whose names are now well-nigh forgotten; and yet he was by universal consent regarded as the completest illustration of the highest type of the physician. His moral as well as his intellectual qualities had much to do with the estimate which all formed of his character. His faculties were remarkably well balanced, his mind was eminently fair. He had that gift—the attribute and the reward of truth—the power intuitively to detect all specious error. Hence, while the added experience of each year gave increased value to his teachings and his writings, it brought but little for him to unlearn or to unsay. He took a wide view of every question.... He availed himself of knowledge from all sources, and for all purposes except vain display; he used theories to illustrate his facts and to point their meaning, but no further, conscious that, with imperfect knowledge, it would be idle to attempt to build up correct theory.... Take him in his teaching, all in all, he seems to me, more than any one I ever knew, to be the undoubted heir of England’s greatest practical physician, Thomas Sydenham.” Another writer in the _British Medical Journal_, Dec. 23, 1882, speaks of his serene and gentle temper, his modest dignity, his benevolent kindness, his unfailing clearness of judgment. “Nothing that happened in the professional world, of human or scientific importance, was alien to him; and there are few men among his contemporaries who have not at one time or another come to him for advice and guidance. Conciliatory to the utmost bounds of kindness, he was never open to the charge of favouring compromise.... It is rare indeed to find any man of whom it may be said as of him, that there is not one man in the profession who would at any time have declined to accept Sir Thomas Watson’s judgment on any personal or professional question as final. His sense of justice, his habitual reference of all questions of detail to unassailable principle, his flexibility of mind, and his quick perception of character, gave him a rare but well-justified ascendancy over even the ablest of his contemporaries.” After a long old age spent in retirement from practice, but in continued vigorous professional study, of which he gave evidence in a little book on the Abolition of Zymotic Diseases, published as late as 1879, the venerable man died of old age at his son’s residence at Reigate, in Surrey, on December 11, 1882.