Health & Holiness: A Study of the Relations between Brother Ass, the Body, and his Rider, the Soul

1905

Truby King Collection BX 2350 TF32

London: Burns & Oates

After a failed medical career, vagrancy on London streets, a severe addiction to opium, a number of suicide attempts, and eventual rescue by the couple Wilfred and Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson (b.1859) eked out a life as an invalid in Wales and at Storrington before dying of tuberculosis in 1907. Thompson wrote poetry and a few works on the ascetic life. Being a fellow TB sufferer, Truby King may have warmed to Thompson’s plight; he certainly acknowledged this passage by his usual underscoring and tick.