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From
Jewitt's 'a Life of Josiah Wedgwood' 1865:-
"It would be far from my wish to destroy, or to
entrench, even
in the slightest degree, on the true poetry of this relation;
but as its sentiment cannot be altered, or its
beauty
impaired, by correcting one of the statements, I do not
hesitate to say, what I have every reason for believing to be the
case, that the amputation of the leg was not altogether the result
of the small-pox, which had produced a disorder and weakness in
that limb, but of an accident; and that
it did not take place during the boyhood of the great
man,
but at a much later period of his life. The boy had genius
and thought, energy and perseverance, in him, which wanted
not the bodily affliction to become developed, and to
bring
them to active perfection. His mind was such as would
have surmounted every obstacle which manual employment
could offer, and would have risen above every unfavorable
circumstance by which he might be surrounded.
The
smallpox, it is true, at that early period gave him leisure
and opportunity to think, to experimentalise, and to form
those ideas which in after life he so successfully and beneficially,
both to himself and to the world, worked. out; but he would have
become a great man even without that ailment
to help him on.
The
small-pox left a humour which settled in the leg, and
on every
slight accident became so painful, that for one half of
the time of his apprenticeship he sat at his work with his leg on
a stool before him. The same cruel disorder continued with
him till manhood, and was at one time so much aggravated by an
unfortunate bruise, that he was confined to his bed
many months, and reduced to the last extremity of debility.
He recovered his strength after this violent shock but was not
able to pursue his plans for some years without
frequent
interruptions from the same sad cause. At length
the disorder
reached the knee, and showing symptoms of still
advancing so as to endanger his life, he was advised to undergo
amputation, and submitted to it, it is said, about the
34th year of his age. From this period he enjoyed a tolerably good
state of bodily health and activity, and has been
known to attribute much of his success of life to his confinement
under this illness, because it gave him opportunities to read, and
to repair the defect of an education which
had, as I have shown, been necessarily narrowed by circumstances."
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