After his death I did not attend any more lectures, although I paid for them. Schroeder was succeeded by Ernst Gottfried Baldinger, born in Gross Vargula, near Erfurt, 1738; and descended in a direct line, on his mother's side, from Doctor Martin Luther. He established a dispensary for poor patients, and gave medicine gratia, on condition of his being attended by about thirty pupils. Here it was that I first began to display the knowledge I had gained from my friend, the late Doctor Schroeder; and Baldinger, not seeing me attend his lectures, naturally supposing I was lazy and dull of comprehension, exclaimed, with astonishment, "What will become of this boy?" Whereupon, considering myself insulted by the Doctor, I wished to retire; when he embraced me, and said, good-humouredly, "No, no such a clever young fellow never came under my observation." From this time I became his best friend and daily visitor; I passed whole days and weeks in his valuable and extensive library, and almost in the constant society of his amiable, highly gifted, and accomplished wife; his confidence was so great, that he left the entire direction of his dispensary to me, and even entrusted me with the care of his own family when unwell. Having given up all connexion with my former friends, the students, I selected one Leisewitz, the author of "Julius de Tarent." We sympathised in each other's feelings, and became inseparable. His amiable qualities and inoffensive wit drew around us the best society; but, to our great regret, many of them belonged to a new school of freethinkers, whose principles we endeavoured, by the assistance of the pious Madame Baldinger, to eradicate from their minds; and thus it was thnt Providence brought me over again to the firm belief of the truth of our Divine religion.

In the mean time I paid the strictest attention to my profession, and was so completely successful, that there was no patient of any consequence in Gottingen that I was not called in to; but as I was not allowed to make up prescriptions, not having taken my degree, and in order to avoid a heavy penalty, I was accompanied in my professional visits by Doctor Tolle, a man who knew the lectures of Schroder by heart, but did not understand them. I dictated to him what to prescribe, he took the fee, and was content. I had nothing but the honour, and plenty of good dinners. At last I took my degree as Doctor of Medicine, and resigned my patients to the care of Dr. Strohmeyer, which was the means of introducing him into practice. I left Gottingen full of honour, with tears in my eyes, at leaving behind me so many dear friends. Puffed up with pride, I arrived in Celle, but was received with coldness and pity. This was too much for mc; I could not brook the insult; but said to myself, "How can I expect to be otherwise received, when I consider my former conduct, and look back on the heedless manner in which I passed my boyish years?" My consolation was, that "I should be soon as happy here as I was in Gottingen" in the choice of my friends.

Among others, Doctor Caritens died during a momentary absence of my father, who recommended while stepping into his travelling chariot, to bleed the Doctor a second time. I did as he bid me, although convinced that emetics and opening medicine would cure the patient without fail; the Doctor died, and you may easily imagine the state of my feelings. I had just begun to publish a work on practical physic, but had no heart to finish it after this sad catastrophe. I betook myself again to philosophy. I wished daily to return to Gottingen, if I could do so with honour. I passed three years under such painful circumstances, when my friend Leisewitz invited me to go with him to Berlin, for which purpose his brother-in-law in Brunswick would advance me money to defray my expenses. Without much consideration, I accepted the invitation, and my portmanteau was soon ready.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

...

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I w

I ought also here to speak of Jakob Bohme. For he too used the German language for philosophical treatises, and has gained high praise in this regard. But I have never yet been able to sit down and read him. I do not like to be made a fool of... Charles I was so impressed by this theosophical cobbler that he sent a scholar specially to Gorlitz to study him. This scholar was more fortunate than his royal master. For while the latter lost his head at Whitehall by Cromwell's axe, at Gorlitz the former, thanks to Jakob Bohme's theosophy, only lost his wits.

Bouvart went to see one of the lords of the old Court, who was seriously ill for a fortnight. As he entered, Good day, Mr. Bouvart, said the patient. I am happy to see you. I feel much better; I think I no longer have a fever. Look! — I am certain of it, says the doctor; I noticed it at your first word. — How is that? — Oh! Nothing simpler. In the first days of your illness, and as long as you were in danger, I was your dear friend; you called me nothing else. The last time, when you were somewhat better, I was just your dear Bouvart. Today, I am Mr. Bouvard. It is clear that you are cured.

I began to reconcile myself to my forlorn condition, but still I was not what I wished to be: the worst of all was, I had no friend; not a human being that understood me. I wrote daily to my friend Leisewitz; he resided in Hanover, and was just as unhappy as myself, except that he had some friends, and plenty of money. In this respect I was differently situated, and although in want of money to buy books, I was determined not to be any expense to my father. Some watches, snuff-boxes, and rings, presents I had received in Gottingen, soon found their way to the hands of Jews at half price. I was even, against my will, driven to the necessity of accepting small fees from mechanics and peasants. This cut me to the heart; but I could not help myself. The following circumstance, however, overcame me more than all: My father was a man of great knowledge and experience, but, like all old men, he remained faithful to the old method of practice. I visited many of his patients, and without telling me exactly what mode of treatment I was to pursue, he only observed, "You will act so and sohowever, I saw the patients had confidence in my father only, and not in me; they wished me to be his tool, and I therefore followed his mode of practice, and thus lost several of his patients, who could have been saved had I followed my own method.

It was at this time that the suggestion of studying medicine was first presented to me, by a lady friend. This friend finally died of a painful disease, the delicate nature of which made the methods of treatment a constant suffering to her. She once said to me,'You are fond of study, have health and leisure; why not study medicine? If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me.' But I at once repudiated the suggestion as an impossible one, saying that I hated everything connected with the body, and could not bear the sight of a medical book.
... My favourite studies were history and metaphysics, and the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust.

My dear old friend King George V told me he would never have died but for that vile doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn.

After death the doctor.

Mr. *** was being tried for a dishonorable matter; he got sick, and died. Bouvard [sic] was his doctor, and said: I got him off the hook. It was said of the same person: He is truly sick, he can't take any more [presumably medicine].

The philosopher’s lecture hall is a hospital. You shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you weren’t well when you entered.

His term at the London School of Economics (LSE) is deservedly celebrated for the equation he enjoyed with the cerebral but morally intense Harold Laski. Less known is the fact that his studentship at LSE included attending lectures by Karl Popper, Professor of Logic and Scientific Method. He related to me this classroom story: Popper was once discussing the value in an `open' society of checks and balances and (as Popper put it) of one `sphere' arriving at an equilibrium with another `sphere' without direct state intervention. And to give his argument a visual correlative, Popper pointed to an empty chair and said, "If you let that chair be, you will be able to sit in it at some point." He, who was 26 or 27 then, broke in and said to Popper, "Letting the chair be is all right, but if you or someone were to pick up the chair and hit it on my head, I think I would be entitled to catch it and throw it out of the window." He [KRN] said that to his embarrassment this intervention was greeted with a small applause from others in the class.

My confidence in Spinoza rested on the serene effect he wrought in me, and it only increased when I found my worthy mystics were accused of Spinozism, and learned that even Leibnitz himself could not escape the charge; nay, that Boerhaave, being suspected of similar sentiments, had to abandon Theology for Medicine. But let no one think that I would have subscribed to his writings, and assented to them verbatim et literatim. For, that no one really understands another; that no one attaches the same idea to the same word which another does; that a dialogue, a book, excites in different persons different trains of thought:—this I had long seen all too plainly; and the reader will trust the assertion of the author of Faust and Werther, that deeply experienced in such misunderstandings, he was never so presumptuous as to think that he understood perfectly a man, who, as the scholar of Descartes, raised himself, through mathematical and rabbinical studies, to the highest reach of thought; and whose name even at this day seems to mark the limit of all speculative efforts. How much I appropriated from Spinoza, would be seen distinctly enough, if the visit of the "Wandering Jew," to Spinoza, which I had devised as a worthy ingredient for that poem, existed in writing. But it pleased me so much in the conception, and I found so much delight in meditating on it in silence, that I never could bring myself to the point of writing it out. Thus the notion, which would have been well enough as a passing joke, expanded itself until it lost its charm, and I banished it from my mind as something troublesome. The chief points, however, of what I owed to my study of Spinoza, so far as they have remained indelibly impressed on my mind, and have exercised a great influence on the subsequent course of my life, I will now unfold as briefly and succinctly as possible. [Original in German: Mein Zutrauen auf Spinoza ruhte auf der friedlichen Wirkung, die er in mir hervorbrachte, und es vermehrte sich nur, als man meine werten Mystiker des Spinozismus anklagte, als ich erfuhr, daß Leibniz selbst diesem Vorwurf nicht entgehen können, ja daß Boerhave, wegen gleicher Gesinnungen verdächtig, von der Theologie zur Medizin übergehen müssen. Denke man aber nicht, daß ich seine Schriften hätte unterschreiben und mich dazu buchstäblich bekennen mögen. Denn daß niemand den andern versteht; daß keiner bei denselben Worten dasselbe, was der andere, denkt; daß ein Gespräch, eine Lektüre bei verschiedenen Personen verschiedene Gedankenfolgen aufregt, hatte ich schon allzu deutlich eingesehen, und man wird dem Verfasser von »Werther« und »Faust« wohl zutrauen, daß er, von solchen Mißverständnissen tief durchdrungen, nicht selbst den Dünkel gehegt, einen Mann vollkommen zu verstehen, der als Schüler von Descartes durch mathematische und rabbinische Kultur sich zu dem Gipfel des Denkens hervorgehoben; der bis auf den heutigen Tag noch das Ziel aller spekulativen Bemühungen zu sein scheint. Was ich mir aber aus ihm zugeeignet, würde sich deutlich genug darstellen, wenn der Besuch, den der ewige Jude bei Spinoza abgelegt und den ich als ein wertes Ingrediens zu jenem Gedichte mir ausgedacht hatte, niedergeschrieben übrig geblieben wäre. Ich gefiel mir aber in dem Gedanken so wohl und beschäftigte mich im stillen so gern damit, daß ich nicht dazu gelangte, etwas aufzuschreiben; dadurch erweiterte sich aber der Einfall, der als vorübergehender Scherz nicht ohne Verdienst gewesen wäre, dergestalt, daß er seine Anmut verlor und ich ihn als lästig aus dem Sinne schlug. Inwiefern mir aber die Hauptpunkte jenes Verhältnisses zu Spinoza unvergeßlich geblieben sind, indem sie eine große Wirkung auf die Folge meines Lebens ausübten, will ich so kurz und bündig als möglich eröffnen und darstellen.]