Volume 3 > Half-Volume 6

SIR JAMES  CLARK.
in the year 1832, the brothers entered on a distinct
sphere of publication, that with which their names
are now chiefly associated�the education of the
people by cheap and substantial literature. This
periodical was to be issued weekly, with William as
its editor, and the brothers took on themselves the
task of supplying with their own pens the entire
literary material. The attempt had perfect success,
and within a few days 50, 000 copies were sold in
Scotland alone. A number of the papers originally
contributed by Robert to the Journal were reprinted
in 1848 in seven volumes; and of these his essays
on social subjects are peculiarly interesting, being
"miniature portraits of character and pictures of
life, " always genial and animated, usually shrewd,
and often humorous, fulfilling the aim of their author
to be "the essayist of the middle class... looking
round among the firesides of his friends. " In con-
tinuation of this first effort after educational reform
the firm of W. and R. Chambers issued a series of
school-books and treatises adapted for higher edu-
cation, and in 1868 completed the publication of an
Encyclop�dia of Universal Knowledge in ten volumes
octavo. We have space merely to refer to Robert's
interest in scientific questions, especially in the young
science of geology. Animated by a scientific pur-
pose, he travelled over the three kingdoms and
visited the Rhine district, Switzerland, Sweden,
Norway, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland; and pub-
lished various papers and treatises as the scientific
fruits of his journeys and studies (Ancient Sea-mar-
gins, &c. )
Robert Chambers was what his writings would
lead us to expect, a man of genial and kindly nature,
and his Edinburgh home was a favourite resort of
men of scientific and literary tastes. His later years
were in great part spent in St. Andrews. He toiled
to the end; and in his last sickness his library was
made his bedroom. He died at St. Andrews on
the 17th of March, 1871, leaving a large family.
His works number more than seventy volumes,
exclusive of separate printed articles and other papers
left in manuscript. All of them have had fair, some
of them even immense, success. He will be remem-
bered as an industrious compiler, as a keen student
of natural science, as a simple and pathetic essayist,
as the popular historian of one of the most stirring
periods of Scottish history, as a Scottish literary
patriot. A pretty full account of his life and writings
is given in the work by his brother, entitled Memoir of
Robert Chambers, with Autobiographic Reminiscences
of William Chambers, which is perhaps destined to
occupy a niche in the literature of Britain, �not so
much from its literary merit as from the circumstance
of its being a simple and faithful record of the strug-
gles of two men who rose by honourable energy from
poverty to affluence, and who were among the first
to attempt seriously and with perfect success to edu-
cate the masses of the people by the dissemination
of cheap, solid, and healthy literature.
CLARK, SIR JAMES, BART., M. D., F. R. S.
This distinguished court - physician and medical
writer was the eldest son of David Clark, a farmer
at Findlater, in Banff, where Sir James was born
on the 14th of December, 1788. After passing
through an arts curriculum in the University of
Aberdeen, he came south to pursue the study of
medicine in the Royal College of Surgeons, Edin-
burgh. On receiving his diploma from this institu-
tion in 1809 he commenced his professional career
as a naval surgeon, continuing in this position till
the close of the European struggle in 1815, when he
was discharged on half-pay in consequence of a
reduction of the medical force. During this period
he served chiefly on the North American station and
in the West Indies. Already his attention seems to
have been directed to the influence of climate on
tuberculous disease, the subject on which he after-
wards wrote a treatise of the highest importance,
and with which his name must ever be connected in
the history of medical science. On his discharge
from the navy he returned to study at Edinburgh,
and here he spent two winters (1815-16, 1816-17)
in laying deeper the foundations of his medical know-
ledge, finding a zealous fellow-student in his former
schoolmate and life-long friend, John, afterwards
Sir John, Forbes. The next two years were spent
on the continent of Europe, in visiting the various
places chiefly frequented by invalids, and the medical
schools of France and Italy. He had been struck
by the indecision of English practitioners as to the
propriety of sending consumptive patients abroad, and
as to a suitable locality for them when a change was
advised. From the period of his first arrival on the
Continent he determined to take advantage of the
opportunities afforded him of making observations
respecting the climate, diseases, and medical practice
of the places which he might visit, "as well with the
view of cheering hours which he had reason to appre-
hend might hang heavy on his hands, as from the
desire of professional improvement, and partly also
with the intention of eventually laying the results before
the public. "1  In 1819 he settled in Rome, then, even
more perhaps than now, a centre of high life, and soon
after issued the treatise just referred to, which contains
many interesting geographical descriptions, along
with fresh and valuable information on the climate
of Marseilles, Hieres, Nice, Pisa, Rome, Naples,
and on the cretinism and goitre of the Vall�is.
This, his first literary essay, was edited by his young
friend Forbes (London, 1820). He soon obtained
the leading practice in Rome. Nothing can show
better the moral greatness of the man than his rela-
tion to poor Keats. When the poet came to Rome,
towards the close of 1820, with his death on him,
he brought an introduction to Dr. Clark, in whom
he found a most self-sacrificing and sympathetic
friend, who gratuitously and ungrudgingly nursed
him to the last. Clark, who paid the dying poet
several visits every day, once went all over Rome to
find a certain kind of fish for his patient. It would
almost be injustice to the memory of this great phil-
anthropist to omit the graceful tribute of remem-
brance paid to him in this connection by Monckton
Milnes (Lord Houghton) in his Life of Keats. �"All
that wise solicitude and delicate thoughtfulness could
do to light up the dark passages of mortal sickness
and soothe the pillow of the forlorn stranger was
done, and though that was little, the effort was not
the less. In the history of most professional men
this incident might be remarkable, but it is an ordi-
nary sample of the daily life of this distinguished
physician, who seems to have felt it a moral duty to
make his own scientific eminence the measure of his
devotion to the relief and solace of all men of intel-
lectual pursuits, and to have applied his beneficence
the most effectually to those whose nervous suscepti-
bility renders them the least fit to endure that physi-
cal suffering to which, above all men, they are con-
stantly exposed. "
During his residence in Rome he stood up patri-
otically in his Lettere (1822, 1823) in defence of the
British medical schools against the renowned Italian
professor Tommasini. Impelled by the advice of
many friends, he returned to England, after six
1 Preface to Medical Notes on Climate, &c.
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