JANUARY 18
As long as you feel your own weakness and helplessness, you will find help from above.
Letter, 15th October, 1785
But I was still in pain for many of the poor that were sick; there was so great expense, and so little profit. … At length I thought of a kind of desperate expedient. ‘I will prepare and give them physic myself.’ For seven and twenty years I had made anatomy and physic the diversion of my leisure hours, though I never properly studied them, unless for a few months when I was going to America, where I imagined I might be of some service to those who had no regular physician among them. I applied to it again. I took into my assistance an apothecary and experienced surgeon; resolving at the same time not to go out of my depth but to leave all difficult and complicated cases to such physicians as the patients should choose.
to the Reverend Vincent Perronnet, 1748
