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16 February 1886: Clifford Allbutt explains to James Crichton-Browne why three years later he was to trade a lucrative medical consulting career in Leeds for a less well paid Commissionership in Lunacy in London

Humphry Davy Rolleston. 1929. The Right Honourable Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt. London: Macmillan. Get it:

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Excerpt

When lecturing “On the Education of the Hand” to the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society in February 1886, I was Allbutt’s guest, and when driving out to his house at Meanwood after the lecture, he said: “It is this hill that finishes me off. I am busy in my rooms in Park Square all the forenoon; consultations at Dewsbury, Halifax, Harrogate, and so on fill up all the afternoon, and then when I get back I have this long drive, am generally late for dinner, and after that don’t feel equal to the work I should like to do. As you know, I have had tempting invitations to go to London, but there I suppose it would be pretty much the same thing. What I want is an appointment that would involve less fatigue and give more leisure.” “I quite sympathize with you,” I said, “but unfortunately there is no public medical appointment in this country that is worthy of your acceptance. You are making a very large income, and the salary attached to the best public medical appointments, those of the Lord Chancellor’s Visitors in Lunacy and of the Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board, does not exceed £1500 a year.” “That,” he replied, “would satisfy me. I have some private means and have saved something, and I should accept one of those appointments were it offered to me.” I pointed out to him as forcibly as I could the somewhat crippling nature of such appointments from a medical and scientific point of view, and the fact that they all meant arduous work, although of a different character from that in which he was then engaged. But he adhered to his wish to secure such an appointment, and I promised to let him know when there was likely to be a vacancy in any of them.

To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

Comment

Date from report of Crichton-Browne’s lecture in the Leeds Mercury.

Rolleston adds:

With regard to his professional income in Leeds … he told a colleague of his that he had once made over £6000 in a year, and that after he was fairly started he generally made between £4000 and £5000 a year. A house physician of his during the height of Allbutt’s popularity recalls the somewhat grim joke in medical circles that “no good Yorkshireman would rest quietly in his grave if, before his death, he had not been seen by Clifford Allbutt”.

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