_MARSHALL HALL, AND THE DISCOVERY OF REFLEX ACTION._
The character of MARSHALL HALL, who divides with Sir Charles Bell the
principal honours of discovery as to the nervous system, presents
a contrast to his in that it displays a mind more minutely active,
and more distinctly medical in its tone, combined with a marvellous
degree of detailed benevolence. Thus Hall’s reputation has, like
Harvey’s and John Hunter’s, grown largely since his death. Marshall
Hall was born at Basford near Nottingham on February 18, 1790,
his father, Robert Hall, having been a cotton manufacturer and
bleacher of ingenuity and originality. He first employed chlorine
as a bleaching agent on a large scale, his earliest attempts having
procured for his establishment the epithet of “Bedlam.” He was of
a very religious turn, too, being one of the early Wesleyans. The
strict but benevolent piety of his father, and the sweet and gentle
disposition of his mother, were favourable to the growth of high
morality, strict conscientiousness, and amiability of character in
their family, while the inventive ability of the father reproduced
itself in his second son, Samuel Hall, a prolific inventor, and no
less in his sixth son, Marshall. It is not often that a typically
good and inoffensive son has turned out so conspicuously original in
his work. But he had a saving fondness for boyish literature such
as Robinson Crusoe, and was full of fun and playfulness. He was
early sent to Nottingham to school with the Rev. J. Blanchard, the
instructor of Kirke White. Here he did not even learn Latin, although
his elder brothers had had classical instruction. French appears to
have been his only linguistic attainment: and the chief fact recorded
of his school-days is his thrashing a tyrannical “big boy” in the
school. But school was over for him at the age of 14, and he was
placed with a chemist at Newark. Soon finding his position irksome,
his friendship with a youth who was preparing for a medical career
led him to long for a similar course, and ultimately his father was
induced to send him to Edinburgh, whither he went in October 1809.
He had already indicated his future eminence by rising very early
to study medicine and chemistry, and giving as his reason: “I am
determined to be a great man.”
At Edinburgh he quickly distinguished himself by his diligent study
of anatomy; he was recognised as a student of the first rank, and
was chosen senior president of the Royal Medical Society in 1811.
Dr. Bigsby says of him: “Few men have changed during their progress
through life so little as Marshall Hall. As he began, so he ended,
delighting in the labour—the labour itself—of investigation.... All
the stores of knowledge which his predecessors had either gathered
or created, Marshall Hall was eager to acquire; a hardy, enduring
constitution seconding all his efforts.... All his energies were
directed to the formation of the skilful bedside physician, that is,
to the alleviation and cure of disease.” It was said of him, “Hall
never tires.” During his three years’ studentship he never once
missed a lecture. He graduated in June 1812, and was almost at once
appointed resident house physician to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
Here his love of order, his zeal, and spirit of inquiry found full
scope, and he took extreme pains in the study of diagnosis. He gave
a voluntary course of lectures on the principles of diagnosis in
1813, which were the basis of his well-known work, first published in
1817. His usefulness to the younger students in the hospital was very
great, and equally striking was his good example of purity of life
and conversation, and constant cheerfulness. His puremindedness was
characteristic through life; Marshall Hall never attached himself to
any man of coarse mind or manners.
During his last year at Edinburgh the young physician, attracted
towards London practice, was prudently weighing the cost and risk of
such an enterprise. He decided in favour of a more modest course of
provincial practice, waiting till his book on Diagnosis should be
matured. As in later life, so now he was “strong in hope, inflexible
for truth and justice, but inexperienced in the ways of the world,
and unable to cope with the cunning, or to dissemble with the false.”
After a visit to Paris for some months he proceeded to Göttingen
and on to Berlin to visit the medical schools, walking alone and
on foot from Paris to Göttingen, more than six hundred miles, in
November 1814. After a brief period of practice in Bridgewater
he commenced practice at Nottingham in February 1817, and with
remarkable rapidity attained a leading position. In 1817 his work
on the Diagnosis of Diseases appeared, and at once marked him out
as a man of the highest originality, applying accurate observation
and classification of symptoms to the detection and distinction of
diseases. Of this book the _Lancet_ of August 15, 1857, remarked:
“Comprehensive, lucid, exact, and reliable, this work has, in the
main, stood the test of forty years’ trial. A better has not been
produced.” When Dr. Baillie, nephew of John Hunter and President of
the College of Physicians, first saw Marshall Hall, he complimented
him on being the son of the author of so extraordinary a work as that
on Diagnosis. Being modestly told that he himself was the author,
Baillie exclaimed: “Impossible! it would have done credit to the
greyest-headed philosopher in our profession.”
In 1818 Hall published a work on the affections usually denominated
Bilious, Nervous, &c., and in 1820 an essay in which the prevalent
custom of bleeding was attacked, especially in certain affections
occurring after childbirth, which under that treatment almost
invariably proved fatal. In 1822 this was followed by a small volume
on the Symptoms and History of Diseases, which was especially
valuable in treating of the detection of internal diseases. In 1824
appeared his important paper On the Effects of the Loss of Blood in
the “Medico-Chirurgical Transactions,” published also in an expanded
form in his “Medical Essays” in the same year. Before this time the
lancet was in hourly use, and Marshall Hall termed it “a minute
instrument of mighty mischief.” Almost all pain in any complaint,
quickness of pulse, headache, intolerance of light or noise, being
believed to arise from inflammation, blood flowed in torrents to
subdue it. It was by his various papers bearing on this question that
Dr. Hall became prominently known; for the dropping of the lancet
was an evident change of procedure which the public as well as the
profession could lay hold of. In 1825 the young enemy of the lancet
was elected Physician to the Nottingham Hospital by a large majority
of votes, and the best practice of the neighbouring counties was his.
He was unremittingly employed: in his walks and rides almost heedless
of external occurrences, absorbed in contemplation; at home ever busy
in his library or his laboratory, making chemical experiments from
which numerous valuable memoirs arose; never accepting invitations of
pleasure; unwearied in his attentions to the sick poor whom he saw
gratuitously. He economised time by riding, being a good horseman,
riding through the country on pitch-dark nights without accidents. He
treated his horses well and earned their affection. “How is it that
your horses never fall?” a friend inquired. “I never give them time
to fall,” was the reply. The Bible constantly at his side was another
mark of Marshall Hall, and he was ever ready to discourse on the
wisdom and benevolence of God, as shown in the structure of the human
body.
London continued to attract the popular Nottingham physician. Dr.
Baillie had predicted that if he came to London, he would be the
leading physician in five years; Sir Henry Halford, who succeeded
him as President of the College of Physicians, termed Marshall
Hall, a few years afterwards, “the rising sun of the profession.”
We cannot wonder that a visit to London in August 1826 resulted in
his remaining there. His Nottingham patients, deeply regretting his
removal, continued to consult him by letter; and his first year in
town produced £800, a remarkable instance of quick success.
In 1828 he published “Commentaries on Diseases of Females,” with
graphic plates depicting conditions of parts such as the tongue,
lips, nails, &c., which he first associated with various disorders
of women. He continued his series of careful papers on subjects
connected with blood-letting. His writings on these two subjects
produced him a considerable portion of his early practice.
Meantime Marshall Hall married, in 1829, and soon afterwards settled
in Manchester Square, where he lived for twenty years. Desiring to
become a Fellow of the Royal Society, he entered upon a special
research on the circulation of the blood, the results of which he
might communicate to the Society. After carefully inspecting under
the microscope the blood-flow in the transparent parts of frogs,
toads, newts, &c., he arrived at the conclusion that all the blood
changes, and all nutrition and absorption by the material tissues are
effected in the minute or capillary channels between the arteries and
the veins. The paper founded upon this research was read before the
Royal Society in 1831, but was refused a place in the “Philosophical
Transactions;” yet an equally great man, Johannes Müller, the leading
German physiologist, pronounced his paper one of extraordinary
interest. It was separately published in 1832. The Royal Society,
however, did not reject Marshall Hall’s next paper, “On the Inverse
Ratio between Respiration and Irritability in the Animal Kingdom,”
which has been pronounced “one of the most beautiful examples of
widely extended observations, and previously disjointed facts, all
brought together and rendered harmonious by the insight and genius of
a master-mind.”[20]
From the latter subject the investigator passed to that of
hybernation, his views on which also found acceptance with the
Royal Society. One feature in his experiments on this subject was
an ingenious apparatus for ascertaining the temperature of the bat
without disturbing its winter sleep. By this time Marshall Hall had
quite a little menagerie in his house, of animals whose physiology
he was investigating; mice, hedgehogs, bats, birds, snakes, frogs,
toads, newts, fishes were in turn laid under contribution. Abhorring
cruelty as utterly as a man could, he yet saw the absolute necessity
of discovering in the first instance, by experiments on animals,
truths which were of vital importance both to men and brutes. Mr.
Henry Smith of Torrington Square was his diligent associate in these
inquiries. Dr. Hall said of him: “I never knew a person so accurate
in his information and so devoid of selfishness. His interest in my
researches never flagged. He was true to his appointments as the
clock itself.”
While the papers refused a place in the “Philosophical Transactions”
were going through the press, to appear as a “Critical and
Experimental Essay on the Circulation of the Blood,” a serious
accident happened to a portion of the manuscript. It was sent from
time to time by stage-coach to Messrs. Seeley, printers, at Thames
Ditton, and on the evening of William IV.’s coronation a packet
containing the only record of a considerable series of experiments
was stolen from the coach. This most serious loss could only be
repaired by a repetition of the experiments, which Dr. Hall at once
set about with most Christian equanimity.
Early in 1832 Marshall Hall was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society, and in the same year he published another paper on the
Effects of Loss of Blood, in the “Medico-Chirurgical Transactions.”
The original papers on practical medicine which he produced during
this period are too numerous to be mentioned here. We must hasten to
give an account of Marshall Hall’s great researches on the reflex
functions of the spinal cord.
It was while he was examining the circulation of the blood in the
newt’s lung that Marshall Hall noted the fact from which his great
discoveries arose. The newt’s head had been cut off; thus its life,
in the ordinary acceptation, was destroyed. The tail was afterwards
separated. “I now touched the external integument with the point of
a needle; it moved with energy, assuming various curvilinear forms!
What was the nature of this phenomenon? I had not touched a muscle;
I had not touched a muscular nerve; I had not touched the spinal
marrow. I had touched a cutaneous nerve. That the influence of this
touch was exerted through the spinal marrow was demonstrated by the
fact that the phenomenon ceased when the spinal marrow was destroyed.
It was obvious that the same influence was reflected along the
muscular nerve to the muscles, for the phenomenon again ceased when
these nerves were divided. And thus we had the most perfect evidence
of a reflex, or diastaltic, or diacentric action.”
The importance of this discovery may be gathered from the fact, that
but few considerable advances in the physiology of the nervous
system had hitherto been made, the most important being that of
Sir Charles Bell, proving that there were separate nerve fibres of
motion and of sensation, and that they entered different portions
of the spinal cord and brain. Dr. Andrew Whytt of Edinburgh had
published in 1751 a work in which he detailed the movements which a
frog’s trunk was able to execute after its head had been cut off,
and had naturally referred these movements to the spinal cord; but
the import of such actions was not understood, nor the mechanism
by which they were executed. Somehow these observations led to
no new principles. But the truly original mind of Marshall Hall
travelled beyond the first facts to trace the process, and he at
last comprehended the nature of such acts as the involuntary closure
of the eyelids, independent of will, for the purpose of preventing
the admission of injurious matter, or of protecting the eye against
injury. The processes of swallowing, choking, vomiting, coughing
were now for the first time explained. Further, in pursuance of
Marshall Hall’s practicality of object, many cases of injury to the
nervous system became more or less intelligible. In paralysis of the
brain, where the medulla oblongata and spinal cord were uninjured,
it was understood how the animal functions could be maintained,
and how in cases where the patient was unable by any exercise of
the will to clench his hand, yet the stimulus of a rough stick
on the sensory nerves of the palm of the hand was sufficient to
bring about a forcible grasp, this being a simple reflex act in
which the spinal cord was concerned. The first breath of a new-born
infant, the spasmodic closure of the larynx in convulsions, fits of
spasmodic asthma, &c., were seen to be reflex in their nature; and
in many disorders which had hitherto baffled curative efforts, they
became possible, because the first great step had been taken, the
understanding of the phenomena.
These discoveries proved so far-reaching in their bearing that
their establishment and following out were the work of years of
almost constant toil. It is estimated that from the period of
his first experiments to the close of his life no fewer than
thirty-five thousand hours were occupied by Dr. Hall in work strictly
connected with the subject. The discovery was first made known to
the Zoological Society on November 27, 1832: a fuller and further
account was given to the Royal Society in 1833, and published in the
Transactions. It was immediately translated into German and inserted
in Müller’s Archiv. Yet most of the leading authorities in England,
with the fatality which attends discoveries in proportion to their
greatness, made Marshall Hall the object of obloquy, and denounced
him as the propagator of absurd and idle theories. In 1837 a second
memoir was read before the Royal Society, but was rejected from its
Transactions; and in a most unscientific spirit, Dr. Hall’s offer to
show his experiments before a committee was not acceded to. Even
his proposal to withdraw from practice for five years, in order
to study the subject without interruption, secured him no better
reception. Moreover, the medical press, with the exception of the
_Lancet_ and a very few others, denounced Marshall Hall virulently.
In one number of a quarterly journal no fewer than four articles
attacked the discovery, one denying its originality while allowing
it to be true, another denouncing Dr. Hall’s views as new but not
true. The long persistence of this opposition was almost incredible;
for years one journal kept it up through every number; each step was
disputed, and what was indisputable was depreciated. “Ancient works
were disinterred in the vain hope of robbing him of his originality.
‘Complete anticipations’ were exultingly announced. On the one hand,
he was accused of stealing his ideas from old writers; on the other,
contemporaries started up and claimed the discovery as theirs; while
some combated its truth, and never ceased cavilling.”
While the Royal Society refused him any honours, and in 1847, ten
years after the last paper, rejected another which he sent in,
detailing an experimental research on the relation of galvanism
to the nervous and muscular tissues, Marshall Hall never ceased
his investigations. He did not, however, like some few men of
originality, disdain to reply to attacks. He was even anxious to
refute any and every mis-statement made about him and his work,
his view being: “It would not be truthful in me; and why should
I fear to declare the truth?” “I appeal from the first half of
the nineteenth century to the second.” “I am as certain of the
truth of what I have advanced, as I am of my own existence.” But
while his opponents denounced him as irritable and thin-skinned,
it is testified of him that his temper was never affected; neither
petulance nor gloom clouded his life; he never wrote an anonymous
unfavourable review. “Nothing delighted his benevolent heart,” says
his widow, “more than to praise others, when he could conscientiously
do so; and never can I forget the sparkle of his eye and his pleasant
smile when he had written something in favour of any professional
brother.”
Practice now flowed in upon Dr. Hall. His researches gave him an
insight into diseases and disorders of the nervous system which
no one had as yet approached. Large numbers of patients came to
consult him personally, or sent for him without the intervention
of a general practitioner. Dr. Russell Reynolds says that his “New
Memoir on the Nervous System,” 1843, described with remarkable
ingenuity the mechanism of the convulsive paroxysm, and of many
other affections assuming a paroxysmal type. “To Dr. Marshall Hall
is due the merit of having rescued the obscure class of convulsive
affections from a region of utter unintelligibility. The action of
strychnia as a spinal excitant, or, in small doses, as a spinal
tonic; the direction—general, regiminal, and medical—of the epileptic
patient, in order to avoid all the excitants of convulsive action;
the recommendation of tracheotomy in laryngismal epilepsy; and the
simple but beautiful ‘Ready Method in Asphyxia,’ were among the later
efforts of Dr. Hall’s great genius.... The two prominent features of
his treatment were simplicity and perseverance. We have seen numerous
cases in which his administration of simple aperients, together with
strictly regiminal measures, had wrought extraordinary cures; and we
know of previously paraplegic men, now well, who under his direction
took strychnia for much longer than a year; and of so-called
epileptics who slowly recovered from the most frightful combination
of symptoms, while kept by Dr. Hall for sixteen or eighteen months
under the influence of mercury.” Even under the heaviest strain of
practice he found time to continue his researches, and to publish his
experience. In 1845 and 1846 appeared two small volumes of “Practical
Observations and Suggestions in Medicine,” in which a great number of
medical subjects were treated in so concise and telling a way that
they were immediately welcomed by a large class of readers. A chapter
on the use of the Alcoholic Lotion in Phthisis Pulmonalis is said
to have been the means of saving many lives; another on “the Temper
Disease” is most interesting to the student of human nature as well
as of medicine.
A friend, Mr. Henry Gregory, of Herne Hill, who had much professional
and friendly intercourse with Dr. Hall, says of him: “In debate or
conversational argument nothing seemed to escape his penetration.
His minuteness in bringing out little things which others thought
not of, was remarkable; with one little atom, so to speak, a light
would shine forth from him so brilliantly that I could only sit
and admire his remarkable mental gifts. He was a great man and a
genius, and, like all the truly great, made no parade.... He was the
educator of the intellect; his domain was pure scientific research.
The earnest activity of his mind made him proceed, and every
advance he made was a clearing away of error and an establishment
of truth.... In emergencies he was both prompt and cautious; when
anxious excitement surrounded him, it did not disturb his judgment.
In dangerous and difficult cases he was always calm. His deep sense
of duty and responsibility was unbending.” There is a universal
concurrence of testimony as to his great success in gaining his
patients’ confidence; young and old looked with delight for his
visits. He would always direct the responsible nurse most precisely,
and endeavour by every possible device to secure that his special
treatment should be carried out. His searching and pointed questions
not unfrequently discovered “hidden seizures,” as he called them,
which had been totally unsuspected or uncomprehended by patients or
friends. His power of devising a remedy is amusingly illustrated
by his prescription to an indolent lady that she was to walk daily
to the Serpentine from her home, and dip her finger in it. The
desirability of healthy mental occupation, and the encouragement of
happiness and pleasing customs generally, were favourite subjects
of his injunctions. Sympathy and kindliness shone through his whole
manner. A Scotch minister said to him: “You place your soul in the
stead of your patient’s soul.” But he abhorred all coaxing and
wheedling; he hated cant. He would not lower his own lofty sense of
independence by anything approaching to it. One might have supposed
so sympathetic a nature would have been compliant; but his spirit and
dignity were consistent with and equal to his sympathy. It was but
another phase of his noble character that he could attend the poor
and the needy middle-class without allowing or causing them to feel
the slightest difference between themselves and the rich.
This was the great physician who could never find a post as
physician in any London hospital. His medical teaching was almost
entirely confined to the schools that were outside the close circle
of the hospital schools. In 1834-6 he lectured on medicine at the
Aldersgate School, and then joined the Webb Street School (that of
the Graingers), taking a similar post. He also gave lectures for two
years at “Sydenham College,” established near University College.
But the exertion of lecturing concurrently at these two was too much
for his voice, and he could not complete his course in 1839. In
1842-6 he gave lectures on nervous diseases, at St. Thomas’s Hospital
Medical School. In these he illustrated many points by remarkable
diagram portraits of paralytic patients. His lectures were given
extemporaneously after careful preparation, and delivered extremely
clearly, without any showiness. When lecturing at a school unattached
to a hospital he would invite his pupils by turns to breakfast at
his house, that they might then see some of his poorer patients, and
go over their cases with him. One instance of his thoughtfulness for
his pupils is enough to mark out any man from among his fellows. A
student was confined to his room for three or four weeks by illness,
and Dr. Hall came regularly to his lodgings to give him a _resumé_ of
his lecture, and of what followed it. No wonder that an affectionate
feeling bound his class to him, and that no lecturer ever was more
attentively followed. The instances of the affection and regard
displayed in various ways between him and his pupils are among the
most interesting records in medical biography.[21]
Though he had been denied the Fellowship of the College of Physicians
until 1841, Marshall Hall was at last fully recognised by the College
in being appointed to deliver the Gulstonian lectures in 1842, and
the Croonian in 1850, 1, and 2. In these courses, which were largely
attended, he fully explained his views and discoveries on the
nervous system and nervous diseases, as well as on general medical
treatment. They were published later, in the form of “Synopses” of
each course, in quarto.
Notwithstanding his aversion to anything like strife in medical
politics, Marshall Hall took a prominent part in the formation of
the British Medical Association, and was at once elected on its
Council, and delivered the oration on Medical Reform in 1840. He
was in his true place in every philanthropic scheme that needed
medical advocacy. The open railway carriages were doomed when he
denounced them as dangerous to health; inhuman flogging of soldiers
was evidently condemned when he expounded the character of the
injuries inflicted on the cutaneous nerves, and the decree of shock
to the heart. He even wrote on the Higher Powers of Numbers, in the
_Mechanics’ Magazine_, and took an interest in devising new forms of
conjugation for Greek nouns and verbs. He strongly advocated a new
Pharmacopœia, based on the decimal system. He suggested in a pamphlet
as early as 1850 new works for the sewerage of the Thames, developing
his ideas more elaborately in 1852 and 1856. Many of his views and
plans have since been adopted: others must and will still be carried
out if London is to be properly and healthily drained.
It is not to be imagined that Hall was so absorbed in study and
practice that he could not take recreation. No one enjoyed more than
he the pleasure of travelling, the tonic of the open air, the change
to the Continent, a tour to America; and he rigorously took these,
and enjoyed himself with the _abandon_ of a child. His delight in
splendid scenery was extreme; and he gratified his taste, in season,
by tours extending very widely over Europe. His visit to America was
specially undertaken in 1853 with the object of studying slavery by
personal observation. In New York and other cities he gave lectures
by request illustrative of his discoveries. From Quebec to New
Orleans, and even the Havana, his fame had preceded him, and he was
feted and listened to with as much ceremony and enthusiasm as his
retiring nature could be prevailed upon to endure. At the Havana
he lectured in French for two hours, and the medical students of
the city visited him again and again, thirsting for information at
first hand. Dr. and Mrs. Hall returned to England in April 1854;
and very soon after he published his little volume on “The Two-fold
Slavery of the United States.” The subject was one which most deeply
interested Marshall Hall’s philosophical and religious mind; and it
is significant of the depth of his philosophy that he was far-seeing
enough to be certain that unprepared abolition would be far from a
perfect boon for the slave, while yet he regarded the continuation
of slavery as wicked and degrading, financially ruinous, and tending
to generate wars. His remedies were first, education; second, the
appointment of fair task-work; third, the privilege of over-work,
to be paid for, and the payments accumulated till freedom could be
purchased with the aid of proportionate additions by the Federal and
States’ Governments. Whether his plan could ever have been worked
out will now never be known. That many of the evils he foresaw have
followed persistence in slavery and sudden abolition is matter of
certainty.
Marshall Hall’s physical frame had been overtaxed by his exertions
and struggles, and he became increasingly liable to severe
laryngitis. Taking another continental trip in the winter of 1854-5,
he showed his vivid intellectual energy by applying himself at Rome
to the study of Hebrew. He engaged a Rabbi to teach him, and when
awake at night or at early dawn, he worked at his new study with
the zeal of a tripos candidate, and never did a pupil make more
rapid progress. He ascended Vesuvius during the eruption of May
1855, a serious undertaking for a man of sixty-five. At Paris, in
the summer, he wrote in three months a work in French, detailing
his investigations on the spinal system, dedicated to M. Flourens,
who had always shown the most generous appreciation of his labours
as constituting a great epoch in physiology. Louis, the great
physician, and his wife, were equally warm in their appreciation of
and attachment to him. On December 5, 1855, Marshall Hall was elected
a corresponding member of the French Academy of Science, by 39 votes
out of 41.
On returning to England towards the end of 1855, Marshall Hall’s mind
fastened with characteristic eagerness on a new subject, suggested
by reading the Humane Society’s “Rules to Restore the Apparently
Drowned.” He remarked: “There is nothing in the treatment to restore
respiration.” He at once thought out the question in the light of his
researches on the physiology of respiration, and when he had mentally
devised his system of restoration, proceeded to make experiments
to test them. Hitherto it had been believed that it was useless to
attempt to restore those who had been immersed three or four minutes.
He said to the Secretary of the Humane Society: “If we take this for
granted, we shall do nothing; surely it is worth while to make the
effort to restore after a longer period.” His plan for producing
artificial respiration, by turning the body first on the face, then
on the side, and repeating the motion for a quarter of an hour,
making equable pressure on the back of the chest when in the prone
position, removing it when rotating on to the side, is known all over
the world as the Marshall Hall method, and has saved thousands of
lives. Numerous details are added to increase the efficiency of the
treatment. But the Humane Society looked coldly on the novel plan,
and long persisted in ignoring it. The National Lifeboat Institution
wisely adopted it; the medical profession received it with
acclamation; it was applied to the revival of still-born infants,
and the restoration of those in danger of dying from asphyxia from
other causes than drowning. At the same time when Palmer’s trial for
poisoning was occurring, Dr. Hall drew attention to the facility
with which the presence of strychnia could be proved by administering
any suspected matter to young frogs, which would be affected by the
five-thousandth part of a grain of strychnia.
But he now began to succumb to the effects of his long-continued
malady in the throat. Expectoration of blood became more frequent,
difficulty of swallowing increased; at times he was near absolute
starvation, and his sufferings were horrible, but his patience and
resignation marvellous. After months of terrible illness, during
which his cheerfulness never left him, he died on the 11th August
1857, of ulceration of the upper part of the gullet and windpipe.
During his illness his mind was as active as ever, he wrote
continually his new ideas, and worked out to fuller ends his former
discoveries. Throughout he was especially bright and affectionate to
all little children; the manner in which he entered into children’s
delights was most exquisite to witness. His Christian faith was
unclouded; as he said, religion was to him the principal thing. In
the simplicity, beauty, and happiness of his character he resembled
Sir Charles Bell, of whom he was the true successor.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] _Medical Times and Gazette_ August 29, 1857.
[21] Memorials of Marshall Hall, by his widow, 1861.