for
Preston, addicted to dissection, that surgeon will be in attendance
whenever an English nobleman is to be cut for the stone. The higher
orders in England will always be able to procure the best medical
assistance. Who suffers by the bad state of the Russian school of
surgery? The Emperor Nicholas? By no means. The whole evil falls on the
peasantry. If the education of a surgeon should become very extensive,
if the fees of surgeons should consequently rise, if the supply of
regular surgeons should diminish, the sufferers would be, not the
rich, but the poor in our country villages, who would again be left to
mountebanks, and barbers, and old women, and charms and quack medicines.
The honourable gentleman talks of sacrificing the interests of humanity
to the interests of science, as if this were a question about the
squaring of the circle, or the transit of Venus. This is not a mere
question of science: it is not the unprofitable exercise of an ingenious
mind: it is a question between health and sickness, between ease and
torment, between life and death. Does the honourable gentleman know from
what cruel sufferings the improvement of surgical science has rescued
our species? I will tell him one story, the first that comes into
my head. He may have heard of Leopold, Duke of Austria, the same who
imprisoned our Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Leopold's horse fell under him,
and crushed his leg. The surgeons said that the limb must be amputated;
but none of them knew how to amputate it. Leopold, in his agony, laid a
hatchet on his thigh, and ordered his servant to strike with a mallet.
The leg was cut off, and the Duke died of the gush of blood. Such was
the end of that powerful prince. Why, there is not now a bricklayer who
falls from a ladder in England, who cannot obtain surgical assistance,
infinitely superior to that which the sovereign of Austria could command
in the twelfth century. I think this a bill which tends to the good
of the people, and which tends especially to the good of the poor.
Therefore I support it. If it is unpopular, I am sorry for it. But
I shall cheerfully take my share of its unpopularity. For such, I am
convinced, ought to be the conduct of one whose object it is, not to
flatter the people, but to serve them.

*****

PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. (FEBRUARY 28, 1832) A SPEECH DELIVERED IN A
COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 28TH OF FEBRUARY, 1832.

On Tuesday, the twenty-eighth of February, 183