Made and Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London...

WHETHER the “great man” has had any real influence on the world, or whether history is merely a matter of ideas and tendencies among mankind, are still questions open to solution; but there is no doubt that great persons are still interesting; and it is the aim of this series of essays to throw such light upon them as is possible as regards their physical condition; and to consider how far their actions were influenced by their health. There are many remarkable people in history about whom we kn

THERE is something Greek, something akin to Œdipus and Thyestes, in the tragedy of Anne Boleyn. It is difficult to believe, as we read it, that we are viewing the actions of real people subject to passions violent indeed yet common to those of mankind, and not the creatures of a nightmare. Yet I believe that the conduct of the three protagonists, Henry, Catherine, and Anne, can all be explained if we appreciate the facts and interpret them with the aid of a little medical knowledge and insight.

IN 1410-12 France was in the most dreadful condition that has ever affected any nation. For nearly eighty years England had been at her throat in a quarrel which to our minds simply exemplifies the difference between law and justice; for it seems that the King of England had mediæval law on his side, though to our minds no justice; the Black Death had returned more than once to harass those whom war had spared; no man reaped where he had sown, for his crops fell into the hands of freebooters. Mi

THIS famous woman has been the subject of one of the bitterest controversies in history; and, while it is impossible to speak fully about her, it is certain that she was a woman of remarkable beauty, character, and historical position. For nearly a thousand years after her death she was looked upon as an ordinary—if unusually able—Byzantine princess, wife of Justinian the lawgiver, who was one of the ablest of the later Roman Emperors; but in 1623 the manuscript was discovered in the Vatican of

THAT extraordinary phenomenon which, being neither Holy, nor Roman, nor yet strictly speaking an Empire, was yet called the Holy Roman Empire, began when Charlemagne crossed the Alps to rescue the reigning Pope from the Lombards in A.D. 800. The Pope crowned him Roman Emperor of the West, a title which had been extinct since the time of Odoacer more than three hundred years before. The revival of the resplendent title caused the unhappy people of the Dark Ages to think for a moment in their mise

TWO great alliances, of which you will read nothing in ordinary history-books, have pre-eminently influenced mankind. The first was between the Priest and the Woman, and seems to have begun in Neolithic times, when Woman was looked upon as a witch with some uncanny power of bewitching honest men and somehow bringing forth useless brats for no earthly reason that could be discovered. From this alliance grew the worship of Motherhood, and hence many more modern religions. When, on Sundays, you see

WHEN the Empress Isabel was pregnant with the child which was to be Philip II, she bethought her of the glory that was hers in bearing offspring to a man so famous as the Roman Emperor, and she made up her mind that she would comport herself as became a Roman Empress. When, therefore, her relations and midwives during the confinement implored her to cry out or she would die, the proud Empress answered, “Die I may; but call out I will not !” and thus Philip arrived into the world sombre son of a

SAMUEL PEPYS, Father of the Royal Navy, and the one man—if indeed there were any one man—who made possible the careers of Blake and Nelson, died in 1703 in the odour of the greatest respectability. Official London followed him to his honoured grave, and he left behind him the memory of a great and good servant of the King in “perriwig” (alas, to become too famous), stockings and silver buckles. But unhappily for his reputation, though greatly to the delight of a wicked world, he had, during ten

FOR many years it has been taught—I have taught it myself to generations of students—that Gibbon’s hydrocele surpassed in greatness all other hydroceles, that it contained twelve pints of fluid, and that it was, in short, one of those monstrous things which exist mainly in romance; one of those chimeras which grow in the minds of the half-informed and of those who wish to be deceived. For a brief moment this chimera looms its huge bulk over serious history; it is pricked; it disappears for ever,

IT has always been the pride of the medical profession that its aim is to benefit mankind; but opinions may differ as to how far this aim was fulfilled by one of our most eminent confrères, Jean Paul Marat. He was born in Neufchatel of a marriage between a Sardinian man and a Swiss woman, and studied medicine at Bordeaux; thence, after a time at Paris, he went to London, and for some years practised there. In London he published A Philosophical Essay on Man , wherein he showed enormous knowledge

THERE is not, and may possibly never be, an adequate biography of this prodigious man. It is a truism to say that he has cast a doubt on all past glory; let us hope that he has rendered future glory impossible, for to judge by the late war it seems impossible that any rival to the glory of Napoleon can ever arise. In the matter of slaying his fellow-creatures he appears to have reached the summit of human achievement; possibly also in all matters of organization and administration. Material thin

NO one can read Benvenuto’s extraordinary autobiography without being reminded of the even more extraordinary diary of Mr. Pepys. But there is one very great difference. Cellini dictated his memoirs to a little boy for the world at large, and did not profess to tell the whole truth—rather those things which came into his mind readily in his old age; but Pepys wrote for himself in secret cypher in his own study, and the reason of his writing has never yet been guessed. Why did he set down all his

WHEN William Dunbar sang, “Timor mortis perturbat me,” he but expressed the most universal of human—perhaps of animate—feelings. It is no shame to fear death; the fear appears to be a necessary condition of our existence. The shame begins when we allow that fear to influence us in the performance of our duty. But why should we fear death at all? It is hardly an explanation to say that the fear of death is implanted in living things lest the individual should be too easily slain and thereby the s