Elias Nason, The Life and Times of Charles Sumner: His Boyhood, Education and Public Career.

While in Edinburgh he made the acquaintance of George Combe, Esq., the distinguished phrenologist, who endeavored to dissuade him from an early return to public duties. Yet his anxiety to lend his aid to that heroic band of patriots who were struggling to resist the encroachments of the slave propagandists, induced him to return to his seat in Congress, which he resumed at the opening of the session in December. His health was, however, so much impaired, that he could only attend to some minor points of business, and vote on important questions coming before the Senate. Finding no permanent relief, he was constrained again to leave the country; and on the twenty-second day of May, 1858, he took passage at New York, by the steamship “Vanderbilt” for Havre. In a letter, dated on board “The Vanderbilt,” May 22, 1858, to the people of Massachusetts, who deeply sympathized with him in his continued sufferings, he made this touching allusion: “I was often assured and encouraged to feel that to every sincere lover of civilization my vacant chair was a perpetual speech.” It was a perpetual speech, which moved, as no words could have done, the national heart to sympathize with those in bondage.

In Paris he came under the treatment of the eminent physician Dr. Brown-Sequard, who, when his patient asked what was to be the remedy, replied,