Some three or four years since, a friend of mine, whomh I shall call Ormsby, removed from his chambers in the University, and entered himself as a resident medical student in Stevens’s Hospihal Dublin. He was a very young man at that time, an orphja, anid he knew that he should have to trust his own abiities and exertions alone, to win an honourable name in the profession, of which he was of a thoughtful and profound temper, tinged with a shade of melancholy poesy;i was his delight, like Manfred, to essay ” Philosophy and science, and the springs Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world.” and to seek for that secret analogy which exists betwcer the immaterial spirit and its fleshly encasement; and thc returning midnight still found him in his solitary apart ment, bending over the folios of Albinus and Haller, patiently investigating the drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci His principal reason for residing in the hospital, was t( avail himself of the facility with which immediate pos mortem examinations could be obtained; as he was thet engaged in preparing a treatise in which he advanced ai original theory, which, if he could succeed in elucidating (as he confidently expected) would have proved a nev era in the literature of medicine.
The day on which the incident I am going to relati occurred, brother student had dined with him in hi: rooms, and the cloth had only been removed, when a por ter entered, and told Ormsby in a whisper, that the patien in the fever ward had just died. ‘”Very well, bring him tc the dead-room. Drury, you will wait, I’ll shew you I beautiful operation.” “No, I thank you, I have got quite enough of the worl to day; I have attended demonstration-chemical lecturt-remained six hours in Park-street, and egad I’ll have ucore of it-it is now after six o’clock, and I must be off-bon ‘ sri.” ” Thoughtless fellow ! said Ormsby, as lie took up hi, candle, and proceeded to the dissecting-room. To an unini. tiated stranger it would have appeareda horrible andghastly sight; gentle reader, I shall not describe it :yet so much art we the slaves of habit, thatthe young surgeon sat down tc his revolting task as indifferently as, reader, you would open your chess-board: the room was lofty and extensive, badly lighted; his flickering taper scarcely revealing the ancient writings that he was about to peruse. On the table before him lay the subject, wrapped in a long sheet, his case ofin. struments resting on it, he read on for some time intently.
Unheeding the storm which raged without, and threatened to blow in the casements against wvhich the rain beat in large drops; and this, said he, looking on- the body, and pursuing the train of his thoughts, this mass of lifelessness coldness, and inaction, is all we know of that alteration of our being, that mysterious modification of our existence by which our vital intelligence is launched into the worlds beyond-a breath, and we are here-a breath, and we are gone. He raised his knife and opened a vein in the foot, a faint shriek, and a start, which overset the table and extinguished the light, were the effects of his temerity– though somewhat shocked, Ormsby was not daunted– and then turning to relight his taper, lie heard through the darkness a long-drawn sigh, and in weak and sickly accents” Oh ! Doctor, I am a great deal better now.” Ormsby said nothing, but returning deliberately, covered up the man thus wonderfiully re-awakened from an almost fatal trance, carried him back, and laid him in his bed.- In a week after the patient was discharged from the hospital cured.
