Title:  Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle

Author:  Joseph Sheridan LeFanu

Release Date:  March 19, 2004 [EBook #11635]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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GREEN TEA

1871

MR. JUSTICE HARBOTTLE

1872

By

Joseph Sheridan LeFanu

GREEN TEA

PROLOGUE

Martin Hesselius, the German Physician

Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practised either.  The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly.  Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable calling which I had just entered.  The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife.  This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place.

In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession.  Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term “easy circumstances.”  He was an old man when I first saw him; nearly five-and-thirty years my senior.

In Dr. Martin Hesselius, I found my master.  His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition.  He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight.  My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death.  I am sure it was well-founded.

For nearly twenty years I acted as his medical secretary.  His immense collection of papers he has left in my care, to be arranged, indexed and bound.  His treatment of some of these cases is curious.  He writes in two distinct characters.  He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman might, and when in this style of narrative he had seen the patient either through his own hall-door, to the light of day, or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returns upon the narrative, and in the terms of his art and with all the force and originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis and illustration.