ELEONORA DUSE 226 BRIGHAM YOUNG 252 Courtesy of Harcourt, Brace & Co. SIR WILLIAM OSLER 278 Reprinted from “The Annals of Medical History” J. J. CORBETT 296 By permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons LADY HAMILTON AS CIRCE 302 Courtesy of Dodd, Mead & Co. MME. RÉCAMIER 314 PART I: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY But all the world’s coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account: All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount: Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped: All I could never be, All men ignored in me, This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. RABBI BEN EZRA. THE DOCTOR LOOKS AT BIOGRAPHY _Part I: Biography and Autobiography_ I BIOGRAPHY Biography is the story of a life, told by the man who lived it or by the student of it. Biography does not consist solely of a record of the events and adventures that constitute the actual and visual side of existence. It is not merely a chronological narrative of happenings, from which the reader may divine the inner and hidden qualities of the subject: it is primarily a statement of the subject’s thoughts and strifes, ambitions and realisations--and, as thoughts and ambitions condition action, behaviour and achievement, that which we call the “life” of a man flows from them. Biography presents a picture of a mind, a soul, a heart; of an environment; of successes and failures that make, or seek to make, the subject immortal. Biography strives to make the subject as real as a character in fiction; actually, it makes him as real as life. This, of course, applies to good biography, to that sort of writing which may be classed as a branch of literature, are not to the formless productions that are often labelled “biography” and “autobiography.”