When his studies were over, Dr. Brown practised for a year as assistant
to a surgeon in Chatham. It must have been when he was at Chatham that a
curious event occurred. Many years later, Charles Dickens was in
Edinburgh, reading his stories in public, and was dining with some
Edinburgh people. Dickens began to speak about the panic which the
cholera had caused in England: how ill some people had behaved. As a
contrast, he mentioned that, at Chatham, one poor woman had died,
deserted by every one except a young physician. Some one, however,
ventured to open the door, and found the woman dead, and the young doctor
asleep, overcome with the fatigue that mastered him on his patient's
death, but quite untouched by the general panic. "Why, that was Dr. John
Brown," one of the guests observed; and it seems that, thus early in his
career, the doctor had been setting an example of the courage and charity
of his profession. After a year spent in Chatham, he returned to
Edinburgh, where he spent the rest of his life, busy partly with his art
of healing, partly with literature. He lived in Rutland Street, near the
railway station, by which Edinburgh is approached from the west, and
close to Princes Street, the chief street of the town, separated by a
green valley, once a loch, from the high Castle Rock. It was the room in
which his friends were accustomed to see Dr. Brown, and a room full of
interest it was.
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