History of the Johnstones, 1191-1909, with ... - Electric Scotland

222 DEATH OF LORD LYTTELTON
Johnstone continued to the last four years of his life to publish, in the
organs of the Medical Societies of Edinburgh and London, remarkable cases
that had come under his notice and the result. He was the recipient of the
first medal presented by the London Society. In all he brought out seventeen
books and essays, apart from writings on non-medical subjects. He was a
member of the Philosophical and Literary Society of Manchester and of the
Philosophical Society of Bath, and wrote in their journals. But his most
important discovery was perhaps the treatment of fevers, and the arrest of
infection by sulphuric or muriatic acid mixed with common salt placed in an
open jar in the patient's room. He used it seventeen years before Guyton
Morveau purified the Cathedral of Dijon with a similar mixture, and twentytwo
years before Dr Carmichael Smyth corrected contagion in Winchester
Prison in the same way. He even advised it to disinfect his father's house
after his sisters and brother died of consumption in 1756, 1761, and 1769.
When George, Lord Lyttelton, was dying in May 1773, he told Johnstone
to write minute particulars of his illness to Mrs Montagu, and also of a con-
versation on Christianity and his spiritual state, which he began by telling the
Doctor that he was going to make him his confessor. Dr Samuel Johnson, in
his Lives of the Poets, gives a part of the letter, and Miss Warner, in her Notes
to Original Letters, gives the whole. Johnstone had to defend himself from
some critics who accused him of revealing the secrets of a death-bed, which
ought to be as sacred to the physician as to the priest, and he explained that
he acted entirely by Lord Lyttelton's command. 1 Lady Lyttelton, the deceased's
daughter-in-law, confirmed this statement to several of her friends, and
she was a constant attendant at her father-in-law's death-bed.
Mrs Montagu's reply to Johnstone's " excellent " letter showed she appre-
ciated it. " Lord Lyttelton," she wrote, "was enabled to be in death, as in life,
the best of examples to mankind. The solemn event is often attended with
such disorder of body and mind that the wisest and best men only show the
weak and frail condition of humanity . . . and rather inform the spectator
what he is to suffer than how to support suffering. This excellent, incomparable
man was a noble instance how virtue, integrity, and faith rob death of its
sting, the grave of its victory. . . . My house when he appeared in it was a
school of knowledge and virtue to the young. . . . But as such a friend is
the best worldly gift Heaven bestows, I most gratefully acknowledge the goodness
of God in having permitted me to enjoy such a friend and such an
example, and submit with humble resignation to the stroke that deprives me
of a much greater good and advantage and honour than I ever could merit.
I am glad that all that human skill and care could do was done to prolong a
life so valuable to us, and that in you he had the consolation of the friend he
1 In the so-called fictitious letters of Thomas, Lord Lyttelton, occurs: "When you are
here I will amuse you with a pamphlet which is a complete physical or rather anatomical
reply to those who defend the right of self-murder ; it is a treatise on the Ganglions of the
Nerves by a Dr Johnstone, a physician in my neighbourhood ; it is written with the pen of a
scholar, and possesses throughout a most perspicuous ingenuity. This gentleman attended
my father in his last illness, and was not only his physician but his confessor."