Some letters from Cardinal Newman to Dr. J. W. Ogle.

RECENTLY IN the Autograph Letters Collection of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine there were found six letters written by Cardinal Newman to a Dr. Ogle. They date from 7 November 1884 to 12 August 1887. Newman died in 1890 at the age of eighty-nine, so that these letters come from the last period of his life when, having been created Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, he was living out the last years of his life as Superior of the Birmingham Oratory. From there he scarcely travelled except on rare and short visits to London, three such visits being mentioned in these letters, usually for medical or dental treatment. There is no address on any of the letters by which to identify the recipient. In the Medical Directory for 1883 there are three Ogles listed as practising in London, Charles John, John William, and William. There was a large family of Ogles, several of whom became distinguished physicians. James Adey Ogle [1792-1857] had been Newman's mathematics tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, and, after taking a medical degree, became Regius Professor of Medicine in 1851. One of his sons was William [1827-1912], listed in the Medical Directory for 1883, and an eminent statistician. John William Ogle [1824-1905] belongs to a distant branch of the same family and it is he who seems to be the most likely recipient of these letters. Father Stephen Dessain, the editor of Newman's letters and diaries, now in process of publication, has kindly written to me describing an envelope which the Birmingham Oratory possesses with the postmark 13 December 1874 addressed to J. Ogle Esqr M.D., 30 Cavendish Square, London W. This is the address given for John William Ogle in the 1874 directory. John William Ogle was the son of Samuel Ogle of Leeds who was second cousin to James Adey. He graduated B.A. from Trinity College, Oxford, and it was at Oxford that he became sympathetic to the Tractarians. A Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, he delivered the Croonian Lectures at the College in 1869 and the Harveian Oration in 1880. From 1857 he was first assistant and then full physician at St. George's Hospital, where his son Cyril succeeded him and where James Adey's son William also worked. Although he resigned through ill health in 1876 he kept on his wide medical practice and it is almost certain that Newman would continue to consult him during the 1880s. These letters reveal a characteristic anxiety about his health which Newman had all his life. He suffered from no major physical complaint although a crisis in his life more than once appeared to cause a mental breakdown. But with his customary passion for detail he was quick to note and write about minor symptoms. The prostate trouble referred to in these letters appears to be a recurrence of something similar for which he consulted Edward Stanley several times during 1861, although on 8 August he was writing of Stanley 'He has already made me betterand assured me that, tho' it is a fact that there is an affection of the bladder, it is (he is sure) simply and entirely from the deranged state of my nervous system.' (letter 8 August). The letters are written on small pieces of writing-paper folded to measure approxi-