During the earlier and idler parts of his life, Howard had been pleased to dabble somewhat in medicine, after the manner of the gentlemen of his time. This stood him in good part upon his travels, and made him familiar with the various forms of disease that especially afflicted prisons and the people at large. For jail fever and typhus he rightly judged that the sanitary and food conditions were sufficient cause and attacked them from this basis. But having in a measure finished his jail and prison work, to his mind, he became possessed with the idea that he might search out and find a remedy for the dreadful _plague_ that was filling all Europe with dismay. The methodical habit of the man's mind is evidenced by noting that he followed exactly the same method in this as in his former undertaking, namely, personal investigation and experience. He left home in July, 1789, and it is surprising that for six months he literally lived in the poisonous atmosphere of the pest-houses, pest-ships, and lazarettos of Europe, and escaped contagion. In January, 1790, however, in a little Russian village near the Crimea, he was called upon to prescribe for a young lady, ill with some low malignant fever, from which visit he contracted the same disease. Being then sixty-four years of age, naturally frail, worn down by sixteen years of hard, exhaustive toil, depleted by a diet that found no place for meats or stimulants, he had nothing upon which to rally, and rapidly sank into the long slumber which at last gave him what he had so many years denied himself--_rest_. His remains were buried there in Russia in the village of Dophinovka. After his death a monument was erected to his memory, being the first placed in St. Paul's Cathedral, London. This was appropriately inscribed to his memory, although it was his latest expressed wish that he should be left to sleep in an unmarked, unknown grave. A just estimate of the character of John Howard can only be arrived at by a careful consideration of the times in which he lived and the peculiar circumstances of his life. The natural inherited sternness of his character never felt the modifying influences of a mother's love or the companionship of brothers or sisters. His ill health added to his restless desire for travel and change, but unfitted him for close or continued application to any special line of thought or interest, while his early independence in the management of his fortune placed in his way strong temptations to extravagance and idleness. It is therefore more than an ordinary indication of an inborn principle of humanity when we find him, upon his first settlement upon his father's estates, devoting time, thought, and money to the amelioration of the condition of his neglected and suffering tenantry. Model landlords were not in fashion in those times, and a man who so administered his affairs must have done so in the face of much criticism, ridicule, and contempt among his peers.