Were medicine and {215}surgery taught there? Dr. Bucknill * asserted in 1860 that it has been possible to compare Shakespeare's knowledge with the most advanced knowledge of the present day. And not only in the general knowledge of a lawyer and a physician, but in what we call in these days "medical jurisprudence," the man that wrote the historical play of Henry IV. seems to have been an expert. Mr. David Paul Brown ** says that in "Frost's case" (a cause celebre of his day), on a trial for murder, the defense set up that the deceased had committed suicide. A celebrated physician being on the stand as an expert on this question, was examined as follows: Q. What are the general indications of death from violence? A. My knowledge will not enable me to answer so broad a question. And yet Mr. Brown points out that "William Shakespeare's knowledge had enabled him" to answer so "broad a question:"= ```"_Warwick_. See how the blood is settled in his face! ```Oft have I seen a timely parted ghost ```Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale and bloodless. **** ```But see, his face is black and full of blood; ```His eyeballs further out than when he lived, ```Staring full ghastly, like a strangled man; ```His hair upreared, his nostrils stretched with struggling;= * "Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare." J. C. Bucknill, M. D. London, 1860. And see Appendix I. ** The Forum. By David Paul Brown. Philadelphia, 1856. {216} ```His hands abroad displayed, as one that grasped ```And tugged for life, and was by strength subdued. **** ```It can not be but he was murdered here; ```The least of all these signs were probable." * = All the arts, sciences, and literatures must have been mastered by our sleepless Shakespeare, either at Stratford school, or in the midst of his London career, when operating two theaters, reading plays for his stage, editing them, engrossing the parts for his actors, and acting himself. (And Mr. Cohn will have it that in these unaccounted-for times, he had visited Germany with his troupe and performed in all its principal cities, coining money as he went.) ** Mr. Brown, Dr. Bell, and others, announce that they believe that these travels of his extended to Italy, and Mr. Thoms and Mr. Cohn, to some extent, account for Shakespeare on the continent, by believing that, instead of going at once to London, when fleeing from Stratford before Sir Thomas Lucy, he enlisted under Leicester for the Netherlands in 1585, but left the ranks for the more lucrative career of an actor. But these theories only crowd still more thickly the brief years in which the great works (which are, after all, what the world regards in these investigations), appeared. * 2 Henry VI., Act 3, scene ii.