Samuel Pepys, Father of the Royal Navy, and the one man--if indeed there were any one man--who made possible the careers of Blake and Nelson, died in 1703 in the odour of the greatest respectability. Official London followed him to his honoured grave, and he left behind him the memory of a great and good servant of the King in “perriwig” (alas, to become too famous), stockings and silver buckles. But unhappily for his reputation, though greatly to the delight of a wicked world, he had, during ten momentous years, kept a diary. It was written in a kind of shorthand which he seems to have flattered himself would not be interpreted; but by some extraordinary mischance he had left a key amongst his papers. Early in the nineteenth century part of the Diary was translated, and a part published. A staggered world asked for more, and during the next three generations further portions were made public, until by this time nearly the whole has been published, and it is unlikely that the small remaining portions will ever see the light. Pepys seems to have set down every thought that came into his head as he wrote; things which the ordinary man hardly admits to himself--even supposing that he ever thinks or does them--this stately Secretary of the Navy calmly wrote in black and white with a garrulous effrontery that absolutely disarms criticism. In its extraordinary self-revelation the Diary is unique; it is literally true that there is nothing else like it in any other language, and it is almost impossible that anything like it will ever be written again; the man, the moment, and the occasion can never recur. I take it that every man who presumes to call himself educated has at least a nodding acquaintance with this immortal work; but a glance at some of its medical features may be interesting. The difficulties at this end of the world are considerable, because the Editor has veiled some of the more interesting medical passages in the decent obscurity of asterisks, and one has to guess at some anatomical terms which, if too Saxon to be printable in modern English, might very well have been given in technical Latin. Let us begin with a brief study of the delightful woman who had the good fortune--or otherwise--to be Pepys’s wife. Daughter of a French immigrant and an Irish girl, Elizabeth Pepys was married at fourteen, and her life ended, after fifteen somewhat hectic years, in 1669, when she was only twenty-nine years of age. Pepys repeatedly tells us that she was pretty--and no one was ever a better judge than he--and “very good company when she is well.” Her portrait shows her with a bright, clever little face, her upper lip perhaps a trifle longer than the ideal, bosom well developed, and a coquettish curl allowed to hang over her forehead after the fashion of the Court of Charles II. She spoke and read French and English; she took the keenest interest in life, and set to work to learn from her husband