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MATTHEW BAILLIE, M.D.
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admired; and it must be added, that the same liberal and just ideas which, on all occasions, guided his conduct as an individual, ruled him in his many public duties: he never countenanced any measures which had the appearance of oppression or hostility towards the members of his profession. Men seldom act, collectively, with the same honour and integrity as they would do individually; and a member of a public body requires an unusual share of moral courage, who opposes those measures of his associates, which he may not himself approve of; but if there was one qualification more than another, which gave Dr Baillie the public confidence he enjoyed, and raised him to the zenith of professional distinction, it was his inflexible integrity.

In 1799, Dr Baillie commenced the publication of "A Series of Engravings, to illustrate some parts of Morbid Anatomy," in successive fasciculi, which were completed in 1802. The drawings for this splendid work were done by Mr Clift, the Conservator of the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields; and they were creditable at once to the taste and liberality of Dr Baillie, and to the state of art in that day. Dr Baillie afterwards published "An Anatomical description of the Gravid Uterus;" and throughout the whole course of his professional life, he contributed largely to the transactions and medical collections of the time. When he was at the height of his popularity, he enjoyed a higher income than any preceding physician, and which was only inferior to the sum received by one particular contemporary. In one of his busiest years, when he had scarcely time to take a single meal, it is said to have reached £10,000. He was admitted to have the greatest consultation business of his time; and it was known that he was applied to for medical advice from many distant quarters of the world. From his arduous, and to his mind, often irksome duties, he enjoyed no relaxation for many years, till at length he began to indulge in an annual retirement of a few months to the country. On one of the first of these occasions, he paid a visit to the land of his birth, which, during an absence of thirty years, spent in busy and distracting pursuits, he had never ceased to regard with the most tender feelings. The love of country was, indeed, a prominent feature in his character; and he was prepared on this occasion to realize many enjoyments which he had previously contemplated with enthusiasm, in the prospect of once more beholding the land and friends of his youth. The result was far different from his expectations. He found most of his early companions either scattered over the world, in search, as he himself had been, of fortune, or else forgotten in untimely graves; of those who survived, many were removed beyond his sympathies by that total alteration of feeling which a difference of worldly circumstances so invariably effects in the hearts of early friends, on the side of the depressed party as well as the elevated.

Dr Baillie was introduced to the favourable notice of the royal family, in consequence of his treatment of the duke of Gloucester. Being subsequently joined in consultation with the king's physicians, upon his majesty's own unhappy case, he came more prominently than ever into public view, as in some measure the principal director of the royal treatment. The political responsibility of this situation was so very weighty, that, if Dr Baillie had been a man of less firmness of nerve, he could scarcely have maintained himself under it. Such, however, was the public confidence in his inflexible integrity, that, amidst the hopes and fears which for a long time agitated the nation, on the subject of the king's health, the opinion of Dr Baillie ever regulated that of the public. On the first vacancy, which occurred in 1810, he was appointed one of the physicians to the king, with the offer of a baronetcy, which, however, his good sense and unassuming disposition induced him to decline.

Dr Baillie at length sunk under the weight of his practice, notwithstanding