he was unwilling to accept a fee for his services. As a natural result, gifts of all sorts, many of them of considerable value, were showered upon him. He devoted one of the rooms of his residence to the purposes of a cabinet or museum, in which all those gifts which were suited to such display might be properly exposed to view, and over the doorway of the room he placed this inscription, "Lucri neglecti lucrum," which I venture to render into English by the following, "Costly gifts representing unproductive wealth."[1]
Fabricius remained a bachelor all his life, and at the time of his death (May 21, 1619, at the age of eighty-two) his fortune, which he bequeathed to his brother's daughter, amounted to 200,000 ducats—a very large sum in those days.
The writings of Fabricius were published at Leipzig in a single volume in 1687, but Johann Bohn, who edited the collection, omitted the different prefaces which Fabricius had written. In the Leyden edition of 1737 this defect has been remedied.
To furnish here even a much abbreviated account of the important discoveries made in anatomy and physiology during the sixteenth century would call for a much larger amount of space than can possibly be given to these two branches of medical science. Our modern text books on the subject of anatomy alone are, in a certain sense, catalogues of these very discoveries, and every physician knows what a vast amount of space they occupy. I have already made mention of a few of these discoveries, and, when I come to consider the splendid work done by William Harvey in the early part of the seventeenth century, I shall have
- ↑ The meaning of this Latin inscription can best be appreciated by those physicians who have, through a long period of years, practiced their profession largely among the well-to-do classes of a metropolitan city. They alone, I believe, would understand the significance of "lucrum neglectum" as applied to a large proportion of the gifts which a practitioner of medicine receives from grateful patients; and it is not at all likely that a layman who is not familiar with this aspect of a physician's life would, under the circumstances mentioned, have the slightest suspicion that the device quoted above could possibly bear the meaning that I have given to it.
