Genre:

Short Fiction, Serial

Subjects:

Temperance, Mental Illness, Lecturing, Neurology, Anatomy, Psychology

    Horace Saltoun's career as a popular lecturer is ruined after a lecture on 'the anatomy of the cerebrum', in which he declares, 'Is the mind that which we can crush between our fingers, or resolve into phosphates or carbonates? No, this is not the mind: this is not life' in a hectoring manner which is 'so unlike his usual style of lecture, curt, witty, and practical'. As he moves on to 'the anatomy of the heart' his memory fails him and he leaves the lecture-room broken and utterly humiliated. (439) Although now happily married, Horace once more returns to drinking on hearing of the death of his sister, and the novel concludes with him in a state of complete insanity, uttering 'long dissertations without point or sequence, in which scraps of anatomy are curiously mingled' (446).