Most of them were what would be called handy men, in the sense that they could use their hands to work out their ideas mechanically. This was typically true of Galvani, who had to construct his own first electrical instruments, and of Laennec, who took pride in making his own stethoscopes. So many of them made by his own hands are still extant, that a number of museums have the opportunity to hold specimens of his handiwork. Auenbrugger and Johann Müller and Pasteur are further examples of this same handiness. Claude {23} Bernard exhibited this quality very early in life and continued to exercise it all during his career. Nor was their ingenuity limited to material things. Many of them were interested in literary and artistic work of various kinds. Morgagni was considered a literary light in his generation. Auenbrugger composed a musical comedy which had a distinct success, even in music loving Vienna. The Empress Maria Theresa said that she supposed he would now continue to write musical comedies; but Auenbrugger replied, with more candor than gallantry, that he had something better to do. Claude Bernard composed a play that shows distinct evidence of literary talent. It seems fortunate indeed that he was diverted from his original intention of following literature as a career, and took up medicine. Many of the others, as, for instance, Graves and Stokes, were excellent judges of art, critics of real knowledge and genuine appreciation; and indeed it may be said that none of them was ever so absorbed in his vocation of medicine as not to have much more than a passing interest in some of the great phases of intellectual activity quite apart from his professional work, or from scientific knowledge: an avocation to which he turned for the only true recreation of mind there is--a change of work. This seems all the more worth while calling attention to in our strenuous age, because it is sometimes considered a mistake for a physician to show that he is interested in intellectual pursuits of any kind apart from his professional work. It is supposed that no one is capable of dividing his attention in this way and yet do justice to his profession and his patients. As a matter of fact it has well been said that no really great physician has ever been a narrow specialist in the sense that he knew only medicine well; there was always at least one other department of intellectual {24} attainment with which he had made himself so familiar as to be an authority in it. It is not the lopsided who make great athletes, and it is not the one-sided man who succeeds in doing really great work. Practically all the great physicians have had favorite hobbies to which they have turned for relaxation, for surely no one understands better than physicians that recreation consists not in that impossibility, the doing of nothing, but in resting the mind by doing something quite different from what it has been engaged at before.