Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/381

BUTTER WORTH AND CHURCHILL. 341 Wakley. Wakley had walked the united hospitals of Guy's and St. Thomas's, and had taken his degree in 1817. He does not appear to have practised regularly till, about 1822, he took a small shop in the Strand, and with the assistance, in a pecuniary point of view, of Collard (now the senior partner of the famous piano factory) determined to start a thoroughly independent medical journal. The first number contained a report of a lecture by Sir A. Cooper, printed from memory. The professors and hospital officers fired up, and for long Wakley had to encounter the same difficulties and almost the same penalties which Cave had pre- viously undergone in commencing his reports of Parliamentary proceedings. As a former student, Wakley attended the lectures, and, like other students, was seen to take occasional notes. Cooper could not, however, bring the charge home till he hit upon the device of calling at midnight at his lodgings, and asking to see the " doctor " upon urgent medical business, when he surprised him red-handed correcting a proof-sheet of a lecture. The discovery was so sudden and so undeniable that neither could refrain from laughter ; and eventually Cooper, not ill- humouredly, offered to allow his lectures to appear if the proofs were first sent him for revision. Conse- quently, Cooper, though often criticised in the Lancet, never received a nickname, as did most of the other medical celebrities of the day. For instance, Brodie was known as the " little eminent ;" Earle, the " cock sparrow;" Mayo, the " owl ;" and Halford, the "eel- backed." The Lancet, for many years, was hated by that part of the profession interested in vested rights, and eagerly patronised by general surgeons and students,