Mr. Thrale, for many years, in utter ignorance what its symptoms were foreboding, had been harbouring, through an undermining indulgence of immoderate sleep after meals, a propensity to paralysis. The prognostics of distemper were then little observed but by men of science; and those were rarely called in till something fatal was apprehended. It is, probably, only since the time that medical and surgical lectures have been published as well as delivered; and simplified from technical difficulties, so as to meet and to enlighten the unscientific intellect of the herd of mankind, that the world at large seems to have learned the value of early attention to incipient malady.
Even Dr. Johnson was so little aware of the insalubrity of Mr. Thrale’s course of life, that, without interposing his powerful and never disregarded exhortations, he often laughingly said, “Mr. Thrale will out-sleep the seven sleepers!”
Strange it may seem, at this present so far more enlightened day upon these subjects, that Dr. Johnson, at least, should not have been alarmed at this lethargic tendency; as the art of medicine, which, for all that belongs to this world, stands the highest in utility, was, abstractedly, a study upon which he loved to ruminate, and a subject he was addicted to discuss. But this instance of complete vacuity of practical information upon diseases and remedies in Dr. Johnson, will cease to give surprise, when it is known that, near the middle of his life, and in the fullest force of his noble faculties, upon finding himself assailed by a severe fit of the gout in his ancle, he sent for a pail of cold water, into which he plunged his leg during the worst of the paroxysm—a feat of intrepid ignorance—incongruous as sounds the word ignorance in speaking of Dr. Johnson—that probably he had cause to rue during his whole after-life; for the gout, of which he chose to get rid in so succinct a manner—a feat in which he often exulted—might have carried off many of the direful obstructions, and asthmatic seizures and sufferings, of which his latter years were wretchedly the martyrs.
Thus, most unfortunately, without representation, opposition, or consciousness, Mr. Thrale went on in a self-destroying mode of conduct, till,
