F 1 « THE GIFT OF MAY TREAT MORRISON IN MEMORY OF ALEXANDER F MORRISON i i a I i i THE DOCTOR'S RECREATION SERIES CHARLES WELLS MOULTON General Editor VOLUME EIGHT ,)rt-»i<» ;:w < tti i> '.^i > «' i »flM Bi imff *t»aiiiaM»^^ .h^^-^^^o.^ DOCTORS OF »• OLE BEING CUP Of MEDIC: ANCIENT PKA H. RVEY Demonstrating to Charl&s^^. ^ His The or 1- of the Circulatiqi^ THE Chicago DOCTORS OF ' THE — OLD SCHOOL BEING CURIOSITIES OF MEDICINE AND ANCIENT PRACTISE ARRANGED BY Porter Davlcs, /D. H). 1905 THE SAALFIELD PUBLISHING CO. Chicago AKRON, O. New York tuaammmmt Copyright, 1905, BY THE SAALFIELD PUBLISHING COMPANY MADE Br THE WERNER COMPANY AKRON, OHIO CONTENTS An Old Time Doctor Alice Morse Earle. Curiosities of Ancient Medicine Andrew T. Sibbald. Surgery and Superstition Frank Rede Fowke. The Physician in Chaucer E. E. Morris, Medicine and Morals Isaac Disraeli. Medicine in the Dark Ages Porter Davies, M. D. Doctors out of Practise John Cordy Jeaffreson. The Profession in Early American Literature Samuel L. Knapp. Delusions of Medicine Professor Henry Draper, Some Quacks Anonymous, The Learned Apothecary Porter Davies, M. D, Old English Literature and Medicine L Arthur King. Medical Accuracy of Charles Dickens British Medical Journal. Old Physicians J. Rutherford Russell, M. D. The Discovery of Anaesthesia Henry Smith Williams. "The Black Death" in the Fourteenth Century William Augustus Guy, M. B. Royal Deaths from Small-Pox British Medical Journal. Extraordinary Surgical Operations Irish Quarterly Review. Early Surgeons Social History of Southern Countries. Remarkable Instances of Contagion John Timbs, F". S. A. The Plague of 1665, at Eyam William Augustus Guy, M. B. Episodes of the Great Plague of London Henry John Stephen. Four Thieves' Vinegar William Wadd. Arabs and the Plague Andrew Crichton. Capuchin Recipe Stephen Collet. The Manufacture of Love Charms Anonymous, The Benefits Derived from Alchemy Francis (Lord) Bacon. Surgeons : exempt from serving on Juries Andrews's History of England. Wiseacre— Physician Lemon's Dictionary, 1783. Selling One's Body James Brooke. Sanctorius and his Chair John Timbs, F. S. A, "The Oiariot of Antimony" John Timbs, F. S, A. Scottish Characteristics Paxton Hood. "Aristophanes of Medicine" Anonymous. The Real Sherlock Holmes Anonymous, 1— • w.- ILLUSTRATIONS Page. William Harvey Demonstrating to Charles I. his Theory of the Circulation of the Blood Frontispiece Edward Jenner 74 The Hypochondriac i6o Andrew Vesalius, The Anatomist 222 PREFACE The Doctors of the Old School is a work prepared with much care, and brings together a vast fund of informa- tion from various sources on the "curiosities of medicine and ancient practise." A number of original articles, by the Editor and other contributors, appear here for the first time. This work is somewhat similar to A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS, by John Cordy Jeaflfreson, and contains a fur- ther contribution by that author, but entirely original and distinct from his former publication. For the courtesy of using articles protected by a copy- right, the Editor returns thanks to Harper and Brothers, D. Appleton and Company, Nature, Current Literature, Alice Morse Earle, and Frank Rede Fowke. Porter Davies, M. D. New York, December 20, 1904. \y AN OLD TIME DOCTOR BY ALICE MORSE EARLE AN OLD TIME DOCTOR LIKE to think of the rich and pompous old doctor a-riding out to see his patients, clad in his suit of sober brown or claret color with great shining but- tons made of silver coins. The full-skirted coat had great pockets and flaps, as did the long waistcoat that reached well over the hips. Rather short were the sleeves of the coat^ to show the white ruffles and frills at the wrist ; but the forearm was well protected in cold weather by the long gauntlets of his riding-gloves and by his muffetees. Full knee-breeches dressed his shapely legs, while fine silk stockings and buckled shoes displayed his well-turned calves and ankles. But in muddy weather high leather boots took the place of the fine hose and shoes, and his handsome breeches were covered with long tow overalls, or "tongs," as they were called. On his head the doctor wore a cocked hat and wig. He owned and wore in turn wigs of different sizes and dignity — ties, bags, periwigs, and bobs. His por- trait was painted in a full-bottomed wig that rivaled the Lord Chancellor's in size ; but his every-day riding-wig was a rather commonplace horsehair affair with a stiff eelskin cue. One wig he lost by a mysterious accident, one day, while he was attending a patient who was lying ill of the fever, of which the crisis seemed at hand. The doctor decided to re- main all night, and sat down by the side of a table in the sick man's room. The hours passed slowly away. Physi- cian and nurse and goodwife talked and droned on ; the sick man moaned and tossed in his bed, and begged fruitlessly for water. At last the room grew silent ; the tired watchers dozed in their chairs ; the doctor nodded and nodded, bring- ing his eelskin cue dangerously near the flame of the candle that stood on the table. Suddenly there was heard a violent 12 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL explosion, a hiss, a sizzle ; and when the smoke cleared, and the terrified oocupints of the room collected their senses, .the riurse and wife were discovered under the valance of the •bed; the doctor stood, scorched and bareheaded, looking for his wig; while the sick man, who had, in the confusion, jumped out of bed and captured a pitcher of water, drunk half the contents and thrown the remainder over the doc- tor's head, was lying behind the bed-curtains laughing hys- terically at the ridiculous appearance of the man of medicine. Instant death was predicted for the invalid, who, strange to say, either from the laughter or the water, began to recover from that moment. The terrified physician was uncertain whether he ought to attribute the explosion and conflagration of his wig to a violent demonstration of the devil in his effort to obtain possession of the sick man's soul, or to the powerful influ- ence of some conjunction of the planets, or to the new- fangled power of electricity which Dr. Franklin had just discovered, and was making so much talk about, and was so recklessly tinkering with in Philadelphia at that very time. The doctor had strongly disapproved of Franklin's reprehen- sible and meddlesome boldness, but he felt that it was best, nevertheless, to write and obtain the philosopher's advice as to the feasibility, advisability, and best convenience of hav- ing one of the new lightning-rods rigged upon his medical back, and running thence up through his wig, thus warding oflf further alarming accident. Ere this was done the mys- tery of the explosion was solved. When the doctor's new wig arrived from Boston, he ordered his Indian servant to powder it well ere it was worn. He was horrified to see Noantum give the wig a liberal sprinkling of gimpowder from the powder-horn, instead of starch from the dredging- box. So the explosion of the old wig was no longer assigned to diabolical, thaumaturgical, or meteorological influences. CURIOSITIES OF ANCIENT MEDICINE BY ANDREW T. SIBBALD CURIOSITIES OF ANCIENT MEDICINE EMARKABLE for their ingenuity, if nothing else, were many of the measures resorted to by our fore- fathers in routing the fell demon of disease ; and to the modern — and therefore enlightened — reader an ancient "medicine book" is a perfect mine of curiosities, in which he may find sense and nonsense, ignorance and a cer- tain amount of shrewdness, blind faith and barefaced quack- ery, all served up by turns, or, it may be, together. The pharmacopoeia of our ancestors was both richer and poorer than ours of the nineteenth century. The former rejoiced in a collection of "leechdoms," which would be enough to make the hair of any modern patient stand on end, and give the College of Physicians the shivers. Where science halted and medical knowledge looked blank, inventive superstition stepped boldly to the front, and bade this charm be repeated for an ague, and that one for a broken bone, prescribed a drink of herbs and holywater for a fever, and the wearing of a specified amulet for the gout. In all "cures" resulting from those mild remedies, faith was no doubt the most active, though probably the unsus- pected agent. It certainly speaks volumes for the constitu- tions of our forefathers that they so frequently got the better of their ailments in spite of the pranks they played with themselves. The old stock was apparently after the pattern of Joe Bagstock, "Tough, sir, devilish tough." We, the descendants, though chips of the self-same block, have lost in hardiness what we have perchance gained in polish. It was not only to the sick body, but also to the mind diseased, that the leeches and wise women of bygone days attempted to minister, with their potions and their nostrums. With beautiful impartiality they drew no hard and fast lines be- i6 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL tween peevishness and palsy; the "vanities of the heade," whatever they might be^ and the disorders of the liver ; they were as ready to fix you up with something good against the effects of witchcraft, or the temptations of the Evil One, as to dose you for the measles, or to teach you a charm to dis- cover the whereabouts of lost cattle. Magic in a mild form being the unknown and ungaugable X of most of their com- positions, it was as easy to attempt one thing as another, the result being in all cases a matter of chance. In Cockaione's "Saxon Leechdoms," we are told that Demokritos wrote of an herb, the root of which "wrought into pills and swallowed in wine, would make guilty men confess everything, tormented at night by strange visions of the spirit world." What an herb for a court of justice! What a stimulating little dose for a criminal likely to get off for want of evidence ! Then Albertus Magnus brings out the heliotropion, and it appears that the heliotropion is also an invaluable herb, good for defeating the ends of those who go "a-burgling." "If one gather it in August," says Al- bertus, "and wrap it up in a bay leaf with a wolf's tooth, no one can speak an angry word to the wearer." This is very good, first-rate, indeed, but that is not all. "Put under the pillow, it" — that is, the heliotropion — "will bring in a vision before the eyes of a man who has been robbed, the thief, and all his belongings." Why, oh why, when jewel robberies occur so often, do we not pay more attention to the wonder- working heliotropion? Betony, we are told, protects a man from "monstrous nocturnal visitors and frightful dreams" ; in other words, it keeps away nightmare. It also prevents intoxication ; so also does an omelette made from the ears of the long-eared owl. Among numberless other prescriptions for the ague, there is one which declares that "the little animal that sits and weaves with the view to catch flies, tied up in rag round the left arm," is to be recommended as a certain cure. Flemish folk-lore, on the other hand, dictates^ in the case of ague, an early morning visit to an ancient willow-tree. When there, the sufferer must tie three knots in one of its branches CURIOSITIES OF ANCIENT MEDICINE 17 and say : "Good-morrow, Old One, I give thee the cold ; good-morrow, Old One," upon which the accommodating "Old One" relieves the patient of his troublesome complaint. The somewhat unchristian doctrine of "pass it on to some- body else," is noticeable in many once popular charms. To get rid of warts, a good plan was to wrap up in a parcel as many grains of barley as there were warts to be charmed away, and to leave it on the public road. Whoever found and opened the parcel, inherited the warts ; a "heritage of woe" in this instance. Persons bereft of their senses fared badly in the so-called good old times. "In case a man be lunatic," says a cheerful "leechdom," "take skin of a mere swine or porpoise, work it up into a whip, swinge the man therewith, soon he will be well. Amen." The amen gives a peculiar unctuousness to the prescription. Nor was the rod of benefit to lunatics only, for the Reverend S. Baring Gould writes of a German physician, of 1608, who appar- ently deemed it a cure for pretty nearly every sort of ill that flesh is heir to. According to this enthusiast a sound thrashing was better than any patent medicine invented since the days of Noah. It "cleared the brain, stirred up the stagnating juices, circulated the blood, and braced the nerves," moreover, for the melancholy that resulted from love, it was simply the cure. What would the sighing Stre- phons and languishing Adonises of the nineteenth century say to having their love-sickness doctored in this summary and unsentimental manner? "Whip him well," remarks the sage, speaking of a youth "down" with the amatory com- plaint, "and should he not mend keep him locked up in the cellar on bread and water until he promises amendment." In Swan's "Speculum Mundi" we also come across some very quaint medical conceits. Feverfew, we learn, is good for "such as be sad, pensive, not desiring to speak." The herb sowbred is a capital amorous medicine, and will cause you to fall in love, while as has just been observed, a judi- cious application of the rod will make you fall out A sly i8 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL waggishness lurks in the description of the mustard, and the author on this occasion drops into poetry : . She that hap a husband bad to bury, And is therefore in heart not sad, but merry, Yet if in shew good manners she would keep, Onyons and mustard seed will make her weep. It would be a shame if we omitted to place rosemary on the list of strange and wonder-working herbs, for, indeed, the virtues of rosemary were formerly very great, although now they appear to have fallen into abeyance. The ma- terialism of this century has certainly much to answer for. It has taken away our charms and our philters, it has put to flight our familiar fairies, and dispersed most, if not all, our hobgoblins ; it has removed the ancient landmarks and dealt a deathblow to the old superstitions. In return it has given us what a well-known writer has been pleased to designate "machinery," by which he means a vast deal more than engines and things with wheels that "go wound." However, what machinery is or is not, has nothing to do with this paper, which deals merely with a few of the up- rooted landmarks ; so to return to our rosemary. If hung about the porch and doorposts it kept away thieves ; but its most remarkable property consisted in making old folks young again.. Precious, precious rosemary ; could you but accomplish that now, gold of Ophir would be your price! There was once — and Galen is our authority for this story — a gouty and crooked old queen, who, being minded to re- cover her lost youth and beauty, took six pounds of the magic herb and ground it in a "stownde." The powder thus obtained was mixed with the water in which she bathed three times a day, and the result was that she became so young and sprightly that instead of repenting her of her sins, and considering her latter end, her rejuvenated majesty began to look out for a husband. So much for Galen and his rosemary. Another of our "common or garden" plants which has lost its prestige in these degenerate times is the periwinkle. Such a list of virtues as it possessed, too ! Not CURIOSITIES OF ANCIENT MEDICINE 19 only was it "of good advantage" against evil spirits, snakes, wild beasts, poisons, envy, and terror; but those who wore it were prosperous and ever acceptable. Truly a "consum- mation devoutly to be wished!" Prosperous and ever ac- ceptable! Old Herrick could never have known this, or surely he would have written : Gather ye periwinkles while ye may; Old Time is still a-flying, SURGERY AND SUPERSTITION BY FRANK REDE FOWKE T SURGERY AND SUPERSTITION those unversed in the history of surgery it may come as a surprise that many of the appliances commonly regarded as the inventions of yesterday, are but the perfected forms of implements long in use. It is astonishing to find among the small bronzes of the National Museum at Naples, bistouries, forceps, cup- ping-vessels, trochars for tapping, bivalvular and trivalvular specula, an elevator for raising depressed portions of the skull, and other instruments of advanced construction which differ but little from their modern congeners. The invention of such instruments, and the skill displayed in their con- struction, presupposes a long period of surgical practise. We find, accordingly, that four hundred years before our era, Hippocrates was performing numerous operations bold to the verge of recklessness. Thus he was accustomed to em- ploy the trepan, not only in depression of the skull or for similar accidents, but also in cases of headache and other affections to which^ according to our ideas, the process was singularly inapplicable. Strangely enough, the Monteneg- rins are, or recently were, accustomed to get themselves trepanned for similar trifling ailments, and it is probable that in both instances the procedure was but the surviving custom of primeval ages. That such operations were then performed Dr. Robert Munro, in an admirable article upon prehistoric trepanning, conclusively shows. His paper records a strange blending of the sciences of medicine and theology in their initial stages ; for, while he makes it clear that during the Neolithic period a surgical operation was practised (chiefly on children) which consisted in making an opening through the skull for the treatment of certain internal maladies, he renders it equally evident that the skulls of those individuals who sur- 24 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL vived the ordeal were considered as possessed of particular mystic properties. And he shows that when such individuals died fragments were often cut from their skulls, which were used as amulets — a preference being given to such as were cut from the margin of the cicatrized opening. The discovery arose as follows: In the year 1873 Dr. Prunieres exhibited to the French Association for the Ad- vancement of Science an oval cut from a human parietal bone, which he had discovered in a dolmen near Marvejols, embedded in a skull to which it had not originally belonged. His suggestion that it was an amulet was confirmed on the discovery of similar fragments of bone grooved or perfo- rated to facilitate suspension. When Dr. Prunieres' collec- tion was examined by Dr. Paul Broca, he pointed out that that portion of the margin of the bone which had been de- scribed as "polished" owed its texture to cicatricial deposits in the living body, and that, where these were wanting, death had ensued before the pathological action was set up, or the operation had been post-mortem. These discoveries led to widespread investigation, and to the production of trepanned skulls from Peru, from North America, and from nearly every country of Europe. These were not restricted to any particular race or period, but ranged from the earliest Neolithic age to historic times, and included skulls of dolicho- cephalic and brachycephalic types. The method of conduct- ing the operation appears to have been to gradually scrape the skull with a sharp flint, though there is occasional evi- dence of its use in a sawing manner, such as obtained when the ruder implement was superseded by one of metal. The process was almost exclusively practised upon children, prob- ably on account of the facility with which it could then be accomplished, and possibly also as an early precaution against those evils for which it was esteemed a prophylactic. What the dreaded evils were was suggested by Dr. Broca, who, while he believed that the operation was primarily conducted for therapeutic purposes, saw behind these the apprehension of a supernatural or demoniacal influence. Readers of Lenormant's "Chaldean Magic" will remember "the wicked SURGERY AND SUPERSTITION 25 demon which seizes the body, which disturbs the body," and that "the disease of the forehead proceeds from the infernal regions, it is come from the dwelHng of the lord of the abyss." With such an antiquated record before us it is, therefore, by no means an extravagant theory to broach, as Dr. Broca has done, that many of the convulsions of child- hood, which disappear in adult life, were regarded as the result of demoniacal possession. This being granted, what more natural than to assist the escape of the imprisoned spirit by boring a hole in the skull which formed his prison. When a patient survived the operation, he became a living witness to the conquest of a fiend, and it is comprehensible that a fragment of his skull, taken after death from the very aperture which had furnished the exit, would constitute a powerful talisman. Chaldean demons, as we know, fled from representatives of their own hideous forms, and, if they were so sensitive on the score of personal appearance, others may have dreaded with equal keenness the tangible record of a previous defeat. It is certain that to cranial bones medicinal prop- erties were ascribed — a belief in the efficacy of which per- sisted to the dawn of the eighteenth century; while, in recent years, such osseous relics were worn by aged Italians as charms against epilepsy and other nervous diseases. When once the dogma was promulgated that sanctity and a perforated skull were correlated, fond relatives might bore the heads of the departed to facilitate the exodus of any malignant influence still lingering within, and to ensure them, by the venerated aperture, a satisfactory position in their new existence. For similar reasons the bone amulet was buried with the deceased, and sometimes it was even placed within his skull. Dr. Munro considers it hard to say for what purpose such an insertion should have been made, but, arguing from his data, the practise does not appear to me difficult of explana- tion. He has shown that disease was the work of a demon imprisoned in the skull ; that this demon was expelled through the trepanned hole ; and that its margins were thus 26 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL sanctified for talismanic purposes. The unclean spirit was gone out of the man, and observation showed that, during the man's earthly existence, he did not return; but what guarantee was there that in the dim unknown region to which the deceased was passing the assaults of the evil one might not be renewed, that he might not return to his house whence he came out, and, with or without other spirits more wicked than himself, enter in and dwell in the swept and garnished abode? Surely, with such a possibility before them, it was the duty of pious mourners to offer all the pro- tection that religion could suggest, and to defend the cita- del with that potent amulet which recorded the previous dis- comforture of the besieger. The post-mortem trepanning may have been such a pious endeavor to carry sacramental benefits beyond the grave as induced the early Christians to be baptized for the dead, and if there be truth in the deduc- tions which have been made from the evidence, they point not only to a belief in the supernatural and in the existence of a future state, but also to that pathetic struggle of human love to penetrate the kingdom of death, which has persisted from the death of "Cain, the first male child, to him that did but yesterday suspire." The possibility of reasonably mak- ing such deductions from a few decayed bones is a remark- able proof of the progress of anthropological science. THE PHYSICIAN IN CHAUCER BY E. E. MORRIS THE PHYSICIAN IN CHAUCER* N OWHERE is there such a moving and lifelike pan- orama of the various classes of bygone days as in Chaucer's Prologue. More attention has been paid to the figures of other of the pilgrims to Canter- bury, but the physician is well worthy of attention. Amongst the pilgrims there are only eight of whom the poet gives a longer account. The thirty-four lines that describe the phy- sician tell us of his dress, his studies, and something of the nature of his treatment. In all these matters, it is unneces- sary to add, the fourteenth-century doctor is widely differ- ent from any medical man of the present day. Chaucer's language is not difficult to follow. He calls the physician a "doctour of phisyk." Thus early had the word doctor, originally teacher, gained its modern popular meaning ; thus early had "physic" been narrowed down from the science of nature to the meaning of a remedy for disease. Macbeth's "throw physic to the dogs" has the sound of a modern wish. In one form of a word Chaucer's use is bet- ter than our own. "Practisour" is surely shapelier than our "practitioner" with its double determination. The physician's line of study is more remarkable in that he lived before the invention of printing. The mass of man- uscript that he must have waded through is, however, di- minished by the fact that some at least of the authorities left no works behind them for posterity to study. We are not told where the physician was educated, nor whether he had taken his degree of Doctor in one of the universities; but we are definitely informed that he "knew well" no fewer than fifteen authors. Nearly half of them were Arabian, five were Greek, two were English, and one was a Scotch- man. The large Arabian element is that which most sur- * See "The Doctor's Window," page 130. 30 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL prises a modern reader, unless he knows his Gibbon and is aware how much of mediaeval learning came from the race of the Arabs and the disciples of Mohammed. The de- scendants of men who burnt the library of Alexandria were the preservers of much learning for the after-time as even the first syllable of the words algebra, alchemy, and alembic may serve to teach. The order of the fifteen names of Chaucer's list is mainly historical — first the Greeks, then the Arabs, then the more modern men. Inside these divisions the order is decided by considerations of rhythm or rhyme, ^sculapius heads the list and the physician would have found some difficulty to know his works, for he left none if indeed he ever existed. It has been suggested that his name may have been borrowed for some treatise on medicine not now extant, but this is to enter the large and fertile but unsatisfactory field of conjec- ture. Hippocrates the Great — his name corrupted in the middle ages to Ypocras, and then used also for the name of a cunningly compounded drink — belongs to the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ. His treatises are the earli- est extant upon medicine. Dioscorides, a writer on materia medica, chiefly herbs, is the earliest after the Christian era. Galen and Rufus also belonged to the second century, living in the palmy days of the Roman Empire, when the model Emperor Trajan was master of the world. Rufus was of Ephesus and wrote on the names of the parts of the human body. Galen — spelt in the middle ages Galien — was prob- ably the most eminent of all on the list. His works are not studied now, except for the history of medicine, but in their pages Chaucer's physician had a treasury of knowledge. It may be doubted whether medical science made much advance from the second to the fourteenth century, from Galen's to Chaucer's time. It is now its proud boast that during the last fifty years it has made a greater advance than from the beginning of the world to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the list of the Arabian authorities Chaucer has pre- served no order. When Greek learning became pedantry, THE PHYSICIAN IN CHAUCER 31 the torch of medical learning kindled at the last of the Greek schools was kept alight at Damascus and Bagdad. John of Damascus represents the one ; and Rhazes, a great authority on small-pox, the other. Both belong to the ninth century. Next comes three eleventh-century men — Avicenna (born at Bokhara), Haly, and Serapion. Averroes (born in Cor- dova) is of the twelfth. Haly is Alhazen, a Persian author of a medical treatise known as the Royal Book, but more famous for its knowledge and discoveries in astronomy ; i. e., astrology ; but Chaucer's physician recognizes a close con- nection between star-lore and the healing craft. Indeed several of the six were not specially distinguished as physi- cians, but as m.en of wide learning. They were philosophers, with or without the special meaning of alchemist that Chau- cer and his contemporaries attach to the word. Avicenna was a commentator upon Aristotle, and Averroes upon Plato and Aristotle. Of the two, Averroes had the greater influ- ence as a philosopher, Avicenna as a writer on medicine. Mediaeval students learnt Greek philosophy through Latin versions of Arabic versions of the original. Avicenna's book was the "Canon of Medicine," a text-book of medical study in the European universities of the Middle Ages. No doubt the physician read all these books in Latin : in his time Greek was never studied, much less Arabic. Serapion is a Greek name and it was that of a famous physician living long before the time of Christ, an Alexandrine Greek who wrote against Hippocrates. His works, however, are not ex- tant, and it is more likely that the reference is to one of two Arab physicians of the name, who probably assumed it because of its ancient renown ; but they belonged to the eleventh century. Constantyn is Constantius Afer, a native of Carthage and probably of Arab origin, but a Christian monk, who left Carthage and became one of the founders of the famous medical school at Salerno in Italy. Salerno may be said to have owed its greatness to the fact that the Saracens brought Arab medical learning across the Mediter- ranean. In the Merchant's Tale Chaucer quotes from a 32 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL work by Constantius on a strictly medical subject, calling him "the cursed monk Don Constantyn." The last three mentioned by Chaucer lived nearer to his own time. Gilbertyn is Gilbertus Anglicus, Gilbert the Eng- lishman, who wrote his "Compendium Medicinse" at some time after the middle of the thirteenth century. Bernard Gordon was a Scot, who became Professor of Medicine at Montpellier, fully a century and a half before Rabelais took his thirst for learning and his love of fun to that renowned medical school. John of Gaddesden^ of Merton College, Oxford, belongs to the generation just before Chaucer's, dying in 1361. He is usually described as Court Physician in the reign of Edward II. He certainly had a large Lon- don practise, and once treated the King's brother for small- pox. If the anti-vaccination folk win the day, small-pox may again be prevalent, so Gaddesden's treatment should be noted. He wrapped the royal patient "in scarlet cloyth, in a bed and room with scarlet hangings" and the result was that not a trace of the malady was left behind. This quota- tion was taken from Gaddesden's latest biography. Dr. Norman Moore, in the "Dictionary of National Biography," says that his book called "Rosa Medicinae," often called "Rosa Anglica," is "crammed with quotations from . . ." and then follows a list almost identical with Chaucer's. The book begins with an account of fevers based on Galen's ar- rangement; then goes through disease and injuries, begin- ning with the head ; and ends with an anttdotarium or treatise on remedies. It contains some remarks on cooking, and in- numerable prescriptions^ many of which are superstitious while others prove to be common-sense remedies when care- fully considered. Thus, the seal-skin girdle with whale- bone buckle which he recommends for colic is no more than the modem and useful cholera belt of flannel. He cared for his gains, and boasts of getting a large price from the Barber Surgeon's Guild for a prescription for which the chief ingredient is tree frogs. His disposition, his peculiari- ties, and his reading are so precisely those of the Doctour of Phisyk in Chaucer's Prologue that it seems possible that THE PHYSICIAN IN CHAUCER 33 Gaddesden is described, and in the smaller London of those days it is not at all improbable that he might have met the eminent doctor, and remembered his peculiarities. If Chaucer's physician digested all this varied mass of learning, let us see what use he made of it. Astrology formed one basis of his treatment. He watched the sky for a favorable star or stars to be in the ascendant, then he made an image of his patient. If this image were made at a sea- son astrologically propitious, it was thought treatment of the image helped the patient through magic. It may be wondered to what extent the doctors believed in cures being eflfected through this magic treatment by proxy, or whether it was a way to leave Nature to work out her own cure. This doctor, however, by no means relied solely on astrology to help him in medicine and surgery. Chaucer says that he knew the cause of every malady, and attacked the root of the mischief. What more could be desired ? His diagnosis of the cause referred it to what were called the "elements or to the humors." Each of these composed a set of four : Cold, hot, moist, and dry ; black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. Chaucer mentions the former by name, but he does not detail the latter: they were too well known. This famous theory of the humors is very old, probably dating from Hippocrates, and certainly systema- tized by Galen. The Latin humor means moisture, fluid. The ancients believed that these four humors or fluids were present in every man ; and that his temperament, temper, idiosyncrasy, complexion depended on the way in which the humors were mixed. If the mixture was equal, he was said to be good-tempered or good-humored; but if any one of the four was in excess the temper was decided thereby. If black bile, he was atrabilious, or melancholy; if the other bile, he was choleric ; if blood, he was sanguine ; if phlegm, he was phlegmatic. This is not only an explanation of a cluster of modern English words, but throws light on many a passage of our literature. "Distemper" we still say of a dog's ailment. Our ancestors applied the word to human beings likewise. 34 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL Once the diagnosis made, the physician was able to pre- scribe, and to give the sick man his remedy — his boote, that which makes better. These are mostly herbal, and made up in two forms, dragges or drugs, and letiiaries or electuaries. The former word is by many connected with dry, and seems to be used of some form of powder; whilst the latter is something to be licked. Both imply that the medicine was made up in a pleasant form, like the powder in the jam in nursery days. The word "drug" nowadays suggests an un- pleasant medicine, but Skeat quotes from Cotgrave's "Dic- tionary," published in the Restoration year, 1660: "Dragee, a kind of digestive powder prescribed into weak stomachs after meat," (that is, after food, not necessarily flesh), and hence any jonkets, comfits, or sweetmeats served in the last course for stomach-closers. The modem French dragee is a sugar-plum, a word conveying a different meaning from its English congener drug. Fifty years ago medicines (the black dose! ugh !) were nastier than they are now; and yet the mediaeval notion that drugs should be sweetmeats might to some extent be reintroduced with advantage. Then as now the medicine came from the chemist, though he was always called the apothecary. The first meaning of the word chem- ist was alchemist ; and its modern use a little awkward, the scientific investigator being called by the same name as the dispenser of medicines. In the United States this confusion is unknown, for there the latter is always called a "druggist." Chaucer accuses the physician and the chemist of playing into each other's hands — a practise expressly forbidden by the laws of some of the modern medical colleges. "How ?" asks the innocent. The doctor would prescribe expensive remedies from which the chemist would reap a large profit, and in return he would recommend patients to visit the obliging doctor. Let us hope the accusation was a libel. Chaucer proceeds to tell us that this physician looked after himself, that he was particular as to his own diet, that he did not eat much, but that what he ate was right nourishing food and easily digested. During the Crimean War an attempt was made to feed soldiers on food that would pack into THE PHYSICIAN IN CHAUCER. 35 small compass, but it was found that the human body re- quires to be filled, as well as nourished ; a continued course of small quantities of very nourishing food left a vacuum such as Nature abhors. Incidentally, Chaucer mentions that the study of the physician was "but little on the Bible." This comes as a surprise to those who thought that Protestantism first introduced the Bible amongst the laity. There is a truly modern flavor about the jibe. Next the appearance of the doctor is described. He was "clad in sanguin and in pers." Modern times have indeed taken much of the pic- turesque out of ordinary life, especially the color out of the garments of the men. The pilgrims traveling Canterbury- wards wore distinctive garbs. Even in the eighteenth cen- tury, to judge from pictures of Tonbridge Wells, costume dif- ferentiated man from man in a way that has quite ceased. This doctor rode in the party arrayed in cloth of blood-red and of the color of peach-blossom. It must have looked rich and handsome. Even the lining is mentioned : it was of taffeta and sendal, that is a rich thin silk. But for fear lest it should be thought that this gay apparel denoted extrava- gance, our poet adds that the physician was moderate in his expenditure. No spendthrift, he kept what he had fairly earned during the pestilences that scourged England in the fourteenth century, of which the Black Death was the most deadly and the best remembered. At that time the doctor made money in the modern sense of the term, not as the alchemists professed to make gold. Gold formed part of the mediaeval pharmacopasia. Dr. Skeat refers to various au- thorities that show that aurum potabile was a medicine made in some way from gold, either by boiling the gold in oil and then using the oil, or else by actually melting down some small portion of the gold itself. This remedy was held in high honor among the alchemists, who (it must be remem- bered) sought the panacea cure for all ailments that flesh is heir to, or the elixir of life, as well as the philosopher's stone that would turn baser metals into gold. Strangely enough, it was believed that the same substance would fulfil the double purpose. With a sly hit at the value attached by the 36 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL doctor to gold upon purely professional grounds, Chaucer lets him pass from under the poetic scalpel. Besides the account of the Prologue, Chaucer frequently gives a second and shorter account of the chief tale-tellers when the turn for their story arrives. In the case of the physician, however, there is a gap — the second in the whole of the "Canterbury Tales" — just when the physician is called upon. The "head-link" is missing. The Physician's Tale is the old story of Virginia, originally from Livy^ but taken by Chaucer from the "Roman de la Rose." At the end Harry Bailly, the host, as the presiding genius of the story- telling, utters some eulogy of the teller^ whilst he indulges in some banter about the sadness of the story. He was so distressed by it that (how modern!) he would like a drink after it. The praise of the doctor is contained in the words "thou art a proper man, and lyk a prelat!" — (Gaddesden was a priest), to be made a bishop or a mitred abbot. It sounds a little strange to the modern ear that the host wanted "treacle." It was not as a vehicle for brimstone that he wanted it. Treacle has changed its meaning. Originally an antidote against the bite of a wild animal, it came to mean a medicine, and later the favorite vehicle for medicine. The host of his chaff says that he has been so grievously harrowed by the story that he has developed heart-disease : "Please give me some medicine. Perhaps a draught of moyste and corny ale would do ; or a really funny story might serve as the needed medicine." Thus the host passes from the physician; and the pardoner is called upon next for his story. MEDICINE AND MORALS BY ISAAC DISRAELI MEDICINE AND MORALS j^ 1 STROKE of personal ridicule is leveled at Dryden, ^^^ when Bayes informs us of his preparations for a course of study by a course of medicine! "When I have a grand design," says he, "I ever take phy- sic and let blood ; for when you would have pure swiftness of thought, and fiery flights of fancy, you must have a care of the pensive part ; in fine, you must purge the belly !" Such was really the practise of the poet, as La Motte, who was a physician, informs us, and in his medical character did not perceive that ridicule in the subject which the wits and most readers unquestionably have enjoyed. The wits here were as cruel against truth as against Dryden ; for we must still consider this practise, to use their own words, as "an excel- lent recipe for writing." Among other philosophers, one of the most famous disputants of antiquity, Carneades, was accustomed to take copious doses of white hellebore, a great aperient, as a preparation to refute the dogmas of the Stoics. "The thing that gives me the highest spirits (it seems ab- surd but true) is a dose of salts ; but one can't take them like champagne," said Lord Byron. Dryden's practise was neither whimsical nor peculiar to the poet ; he was of a full habit, and, no doubt, had often found by experience the beneficial effects without being aware of the cause, which is nothing less than the reciprocal influence of mind and body. This simple fact is, indeed, connected with one of the most important inquiries in the history of man — the laws which regulate the invisible union of the soul with the body : in a word, the inscrutable mystery of our being! — a secret, but an undoubted intercourse, which probably must ever elude our perceptions. The combinations of metaphysics with physics has only been productive of the wildest fairy 40 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL tales among philosophers ; with one party the soul seems to pass away in its last puff of air, while man seems to perish in "dust to dust" ; the other as successfully gets rid of our bodies altogether, by denying the existence of matter. We are not certain that mind and matter are distinct existences, since the one may be only a modification of the other ; how- ever this great mystery be imagined, we shall find with Dr. Gregory, in his lectures "on the duties and qualifications of a physician," that it forms an equally necessary inquiry in the sciences of morals and of medicine. Whether we consider the vulgar distinction of mind and body as a union, or as a modified existence, no philosopher denies that a reciprocal action takes place between our moral and physical condition. Of these sympathies, like many other mysteries of nature, the cause remains occult while the effects are obvious. This close yet inscrutable association, this concealed correspondence of parts seemingly uncon- nected, in a word, this reciprocal influence of the mind and the body, has long fixed the attention of medical and meta- physical inquirers ; the one having the care of our exterior organization, the other that of the interior. Can we conceive the mysterious inhabitant as forming a part of its own habi- tation? The tenant and the house are so inseparable, that in striking at any part of the dwelling, you inevitably reach the dweller. If the mind be disordered, we may often look for its seat in some corporal derangement. Often are our thoughts disturbed by a strange irritability, which we do not even pretend to account for. This state of the body, called the fidgets, is a disorder to which the ladies are particularly liable. A physician of my acquaintance was earnestly en- treated by a female patient to give a name to her unknown complaints ; this he found no difficulty to do, as he is a sturdy assertor of the materiality of our nature ; he declared that her disorder was atmospherical. It was the disorder of her frame under damp weather^ which was reacting on her mind ; and physical means, by operating on her body, might be applied to restore her to her half-lost senses. Our imag- ination is higher when our stomach is not overloaded ; in MEDICINE AND MORALS 41 spring than in winter ; in solitude than amidst company ; and in an obscured light than in the blaze and heat of the noon. In all these cases the body is evidently acted on, and reacts on the mind. Sometimes our dreams present us with images of our restlessness till we recollect that the seat of our brain may perhaps lie in our stomach, rather than on the pineal gland of Descartes ; and that the most artificial logic to make us somewhat reasonable, may be swallowed with "the blue pill." Our domestic happiness often depends on the state of our biliary and digestive organs, and the little dis- turbances of conjugal life may be more efficaciously cured by the physician than by the moralist ; for a sermon misapplied will never act so directly as a sharp medicine. The learned Gaubius, an eminent professor of medicine at Leyden, who called himself "professor of the passions," gives the case of a lady of too inflammable a constitution, whom her husband, unknown to herself, had gradually reduced to a model of decorum, by phlebotomy. Her complexion, indeed, lost the roses, which some, perhaps, had too wantonly admired for the repose of her conjugal physician. The art of curing moral disorders by corporeal means has not yet been brought into general practise, although it is probable that some quiet sages of medicine have made use of it on some occasions. The Leyden professor we have just alluded to delivered at the university a discourse "on the management and cure of the disorders of the mind by appli- cation to the body." Descartes conjectured, that as the mind seems so dependent on the disposition of the bodily organs, if any means can be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than they have been hitherto, such a method might be sought from the assistance of medicine. The sciences of Morals and of Medicine will therefore be found to have a more intimate connection than has been suspected. Plato thought that a man must have natural dispositions toward virtue to become virtuous ; that it cannot be educated — you cannot make a bad man a good man; which he ascribes to the evil dispositions of the body, as well as to a bad educa- tion. 42 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL There are, unquestionably, constitutional moral disorders; some good-tempered but passionate persons have acknowl- edged that they cannot avoid those temporary fits to which they are liable^ and which, they say, they always suffered "from a child." If they arise from too great a fulness of blood, is it not cruel to upbraid rather than to cure them, which might easily be done by taking away their redundant humors, and thus quieting the most passionate man alive? A moral patient who allows his brain to be disordered by the fumes of liquor, instead of being suffered to be a ridiculous being, might have opiates prescribed ; for in laying him asleep as soon as possible, you remove the cause of his sud- den madness. There are crimes for which men are hanged, but of which they might easily have been cured by physical means. Persons out of their senses with love, by throwing themselves into a river and being dragged out nearly life- less, have recovered their senses, and lost their bewildering passion. Submersion is discovered to be a cure for some mental disorders, by altering the state of the body, and as Van Helmont notices, "was happily practised in England." With the circumstance to which this sage of chemistry al- ludes, I am unacquainted ; but this extraordinary practise was certainly known to the Italians ; for in one of the tales of the Poggio we find a mad doctor of Milan, who was cele- brated for curing lunatics and demoniacs in a certain time. His practise consisted in placing them in a great high-walled courtyard, in the midst of which there was a deep well full of water, cold as ice. When a demoniac was brought to this physician, he had the patient bound to a pillar in the well, till the water ascended to the knees, or higher, and even to the neck, as he deemed their malady required. In their bodily pain they appear to have forgot their melancholy ; thus by the terrors of the repetition of cold water, a man appears to have been frightened into his senses! A phy- sician has informed me of a remarkable case : a lady with a disordered mind resolved on death, and swallowed much more than half a pint of laudanum ; she closed her curtains in the evening, took a farewell of her attendants, and flat- MEDICINE AND MORALS 43 tered herself she should never awaken from her sleep. In the morning, however, notwithstanding this incredible dose, she awoke in the agonies of death. By the usual means she was enabled to get rid of the poison she had so largely taken, and not only recovered her life, but, what is more extraor- dinary, her perfect senses ! The physician conjectures that it was the influence of her disordered mind over her body which prevented this vast quantity of laudanum from its usual action by terminating in death. Moral vices or infirmities, which originate in the state of the body, may be cured by topical applications. Precepts and ethics in such cases, if they seem to produce a momen- tary cure, have only moved the weeds, whose roots lie in the soil. It is only by changing the soil itself that we can eradicate these evils. The senses are five porches for the physician to enter into the mind, to keep it in repair. By altering the state of the body, we are changing that of the mind, whenever the defects of the mind depend on those of the organization. The mind, or soul, however distinct its being from the body, is disturbed or excited, independent of its volition, by the mechanical impulses of the body. A man becomes stupefied when the circulation of the blood is impeded in the viscera; he acts more from instinct than re- flection ; the nervous fibres are too relaxed or too tense, and he finds a difficulty in moving them ; if you heighten his sensations, you awaken new ideas in this stupid being; and as we cure the stupid by increasing his sensibility, we may believe that a more vivacious fancy may be promised to those who possess one, when the mind and the body play to- gether in one harmonious accord. Prescribe the bath, fric- tions, and fomentations, and though it seems a round-about way, you get at the brains by his feet. A literary man, from long sedentary habits, could not overcome his fits of melan- choly till his physician doubled his daily quantity of wine; and the learned Henry Stephens, after a severe ague, had such a disgust of books, the most beloved objects of his whole life, that the very thought of them excited terror for a considerable time. It is evident that the state of the body 44 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL often indicates that of the mind. Insanity itself often re- sults from some disorder in the human machine. "What is this MIND, of which men appear so vain ?" exclaims Flechier. "If considered according to its nature it is a fire which sickness and an accident most sensibly puts out ; it is a deli- cate temperament, which soon grows disordered ; a happy conformation of organs, which wear out ; a combination and a certain motion of the spirits, which exhaust themselves ; it is the most lively and the most subtle part of the soul, which seems to grow old with the body." It Is not wonderful that some have attributed such virtues to their system of diet, if it has been found productive of certain effects on the human body. Cornaro perhaps imag- ined more than he experienced ; but Apollonius Tyaneus, when he had the credit of holding an intercourse with the devil, by his presumed gift of prophecy, defended himself from the accusation by attributing his clear and prescient views of things to the light aliments he lived on, never in- dulging in a variety of food. "This mode of life has pro- duced such a perspicuity in my ideas, that I see as in a glass things past and future." We may, therefore, agree with Bayes, that "for a sonnet to Amanda, and the like, stewed prunes only" might be sufficient ; but for "a grand design," nothing less than a more formal and formidable dose. Camus, a French physician, who combined literature with science, the author of "Abdeker, or the Art of Cosmetics," which he discovered in exercise and temperance, produced another fanciful work, written in 1753, "La Medecine de I'Esprit." His conjectural cases are at least as numerous as his more positive facts ; for he is not wanting in imagina- tion. He assures us, that having reflected on the physical causes, which, by differently modifying the body, varied also the dispositions of the mind, he was convinced that by em- ploying these different causes, or by imitating their powers by art, we might, by means purely mechanical, affect the human mind, and correct the infirmities of the understanding and the will. He considered this principle only as the aurora of a brighter day. The great difficulty to overcome was to MEDICINE AND MORALS 45 find out a method to root out the defects, or the diseases of the soul, in the same manner as physicians cure a fluxion from the lungs, a dysentery, a dropsy, and all other infirmi- ties, which seem only to attack the body. This, indeed, he says, is enlarging the domain of medicine, by showing how the functions of intellect and the springs of volition are mechanical. The movements and passions of the soul, for- merly restricted to abstract reasonings, are by this system reduced to simple ideas. Insisting that material causes force the soul and body to act together, the defects of the intel- lectual operations depend on those of the organization, which may be altered or destroyed by physical causes ; and he prop- erly adds, that we are to consider that the soul is material, while existing in matter, because it is operated on by matter. Such is the theory of "La Medecine de I'Esprit," which, though physicians will never quote, may perhaps contain some facts worth their attention. Camus's two little volumes seem to have been preceded by a medical discourse delivered in the academy of Dijon in 1748, where the moralist compares the infirmities and vices of the mind to parallel diseases of the body. We may safely consider some infirmities and passions of the mind as dis- eases, and could they be treated as we do the bodily ones, to which they bear an affinity, this would be the great tri- umph of "morals and medicine." The passion of avarice resembles the thirst of dropsical patients ; that of envy is a slow wasting fever ; love is often frenzy, and capricious and sudden restlessness, epileptic fits. There are moral disorders which at times spread like epidemical maladies through towns, and countries, and even nations. There are heredi- tary vices and infirmities transmitted from the parent's mind, as there are unquestionably such diseases of the body ; the son of a father of a hot and irritable temperament inherits the same quickness and warmth ; a daughter is often the counterpart of her mother. Morality, could it be treated medicinally, would require its prescriptions, as all diseases have their specific remedies ; the great secret is perhaps dis- 46 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL covered by Camus — that of operating on the mind by means of the body. A recent writer seems to have been struck by these curious analogies. Mr. Haslam, in his work on "Sound Mind," says (p. 90) : "There seems to be a considerable similarity be- tween the morbid state of the instruments of voluntary mo- tion (that is, the body,) and certain affections of the mental powers (that is, the mind). Thus, paralysis has its counter- part in the defects of recollection, where the utmost endeavor to remember is ineffectually exerted. Tremor may be com- pared with incapability of -fixing the attention, and this in- voluntary state of muscles ordinarily subjected to the will, also finds a parallel where the mind loses its influence in the train of thought, and becomes subject to spontaneous in- trusions ; as may be exemplified in reveries, dreaming, and some species of madness." Thus one philosopher discovers the analogies of the mind with the body, and another of the body with the mind. Can we now hesitate to believe that such analogies exist — and, advancing one step further, trace in this reciprocal influence that a part of the soul is the body, as the body becomes a part of the soul ? The most important truth remains undivulged, and ever will in this mental pharmacy ; but none is more clear than that which led to the view of this subject, that in this mutual intercourse of body and mind the superior is often governed by the inferior ; others think the mind is more wilfully outrageous than the body. Plutarch, in his essays, has a familiar illustration which he borrows from some phil- osopher more ancient than himself: "Should the body sue the mind before a court of judicature for damages, it would be found that the mind would prove to have been a ruinous tenant to its landlord." The sage of Cheronaea did not fore- see the hint of Descartes and the discovery of Camus, that by medicine we may alleviate or remove the diseases of the mind ; a practise which indeed has not yet been pursued by physicians, though the moralists have been often struck by the close analogies of the mind with the body ! A work by the learned Don Pernetty, La Connoissance De L'Homme MEDICINE AND MORALS 47 Moral Par Celle De U Homme Physique, we are told is more fortunate in its title than its execution ; probably it is one of the many attempts to develop this imperfect and obscured truth, which hereafter may become more obvious, and be universally comprehended. MEDICINE IN THE DARK AGES BY PORTER DA VIES, M. D. MEDICINE IN THE DARK AGES |ROM the fall of the Roman Empire until the revival of letters in the sixteenth century, the treatment of disease throughout Christendom was chiefly in the hands of the monks, whose practise was a jumble of medication and superstitious rites. Their influence on the progress of therapeutics, considered as a merely mundane art, must be set down as on the whole unfavorable. Belief in the miracles of "Holy Church" paralyzed the search after rational remedies for disease, and interfered with their effective use even when found. Charms and amulets were more trusted than medicines. Yet the monks did not alto- gether fall in with the superstitious ideas of the times. In connection with the monastery were often to be found the well-managed hospital and the garden stocked with plants reputed to possess healing virtues. Doubtless the monks v/ere the means of saving many lives in the dark and trou- blous time of the Middle Ages, when the monastery and its hospital often formed the only refuge for the sick and the wounded. In these dark ages, light gleamed from an unlooked-for quarter. The Arabians, whose conquest and sway over Western Asia, Northern Africa, and Spain, belong to the history of the period intervening between the seventh and the thirteenth century, after settling down in the fair re- gions they had won from the Christian by the sword, began to cultivate the arts and sciences. They founded schools and collected libraries, and the works of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Hippocrates, and Galen, were translated into Arabic by Honair, a physician of Bagdad (the capital of the Arabian or Mohammedan Empire), in A. D. 870. Besides preserv- ing from destruction the writings of the great teachers of Greece, the Arabs made some improvements in the art of S3 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL medicine. For example, they substituted mild aperients, such as senna and rhubarb, for the terrible hellebore (the purgative of Hippocrates), made additions, such as musk, to the materia medica, and were the first to employ distilla- tion, as well as chemical analysis. One of the most distinguished among the Arabian physi- cians was Rhazes, who wrote twelve books on chemistry, and a work on small-pox, a disease he was the first to de- scribe. His pathology and therapeutics he took from Galen, of whom he seems to have been a devoted disciple. Of even greater renown than Rhazes was Avicenna, called Scheikh Reyes, or the Prince of Physicians. He was born at Bok- hara, and at an early age was celebrated for the extent of his acquirements in all branches of knowledge then taught. He translated the works of Aristotle into Arabic, from which, in the twelfth century, Michael Scott, known in Scottish tradition as the "wizard/' and whose tomb is still to be seen in Melrose Abbey, translated them into Latin. A singularly circuitous way was this for knowledge to reach the remote isles of Western Europe. After a chequered life, being at one time a vizier, at another in prison or exile, he died in the year 1036, at the age of fifty-eight. His system of thera- peutics in no way differed from that of Galen (who died about A. D, 2G0), but the literary talent displayed in his writings caused them to be for hundreds of years an indis- putable authority in medicine. Contemporary with Avicenna flourished the Arab historian of medicine, Haly Abbas, surnamed Magus, on account of his great learning, whose great book, of which a Latin trans- lation still exists, was called "Almalecus," or the Royal Work. A like or even greater renown in medicine has fallen to the lot of Avenzoar of Seville and Averroes of Cordova, two of the most learned men and greatest ornaments of Spain under the Saracens. Later than these flourished Abulcasis, also a distinguished medical writer and practitioner. The credit due to the Arabians amounts to this, that they made some not unimportant additions to the materia medica, described some new diseases ; e. g., small-pox and measles ; MEDICINE IN THE DARK AGES 53 and prevented the knowledge and wisdom of the Greeks from perishing amid the great historic cataclasm involved in the breaking up of the Roman Empire and the overflow- ing of Europe by the tide of Northern barbarism. The bar- barians, whether Goths, Vandals, Huns, Visigoths, Franks, or Lombards, while, through fear of disease, they set value upon the captive physician, and often lavishly rewarded his services, had neither time, taste, nor opportunity to cultivate the science and art of medicine, nor in the turbulent scenes which they everywhere created was it possible for the class of learned men to be perpetuated. It was strange that the healing art found a patronage from a faith based on the power of the sword, which it could not then find from that founded on the words of Him who is justly called the Great Physician. An exception to this state of things in Christendom was latterly — that is, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century — to be witnessed in the Italian republics, whose magnificent cities were the homes of whatever learning and art had sur- vived the barbaric deluge. Milan, for example, in the days of its greatest glory, is said to have contained 200 physicians, many of them men of good family and of high intelligence and education. An Italian physician, Dr. Giovanni di Pro- ceda, made his name prominent in connection with the political movement rendered ever memorable by the "Si- cilian Vespers," But, even in Italy, the influence exercised by such a half-mad, though undoubtedly clever, charlatan as Jerome Cardan, shows that the general community was not remarkable for enlightenment on medical subjects. But one medical school, that of Salernum, near Naples, attained to great and deserved renown. It was called the "City of Hippocrates," and its foundation consisted of ten doctors, or professors. It was long the only Christian school of medi- cine in Europe worthy of the name ; for though here and there, in university or cloister, might be entombed some prodigy of learning, and such a marvel of genius as Roger Bacon might create astonishment and awe, and bring upon himself the anathemas of the church, the general state of 54 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL medical science was deplorable, as was evidenced by the ravages of the "sweating sickness" and other plagues and epidemics which swept over and decimated the helpless popu- lations. But by-and-by a better era dawned on the West, fraught with new health, both of soul and body, to the great masses of the people. It was at the close of the period now referred to that a singular character appeared on the stage of medical history — Paracelsus, who was bom 'at Einsedeln, near Zurich, in Switzerland, in 1490. His father was superintendent of the convent hospital in Einsedeln, and from him Paracelsus re- ceived the rudiments of his education. What further in- struction he received is not known, but eventually he set out upon his travels and visited Italy, Germany, and Swe- den, and even extended his peregrinations to Asia and Egypt. He is conjectured to have maintained himself by working "wonderful cures," and there seems to be no doubt that he had made some attainments, if not discoveries, in chemistry. At the age of thirty-three he boasted of having cured thir- teen princes whose cases had been declared hopeless. He became Professor of Physic and Surgery in the University of Basle in the year 1526. Beginning his career by publicly burning the works of Galen and Rhazes, he lectured to his class, in German, on the incompetency of reading and the necessity of travel and practise to make a physician. His style and opinions did not win the respect of his pupils, and the class-room was soon deserted. This, with an ignoble quarrel in which he involved himself, compelled his retire- ment from Basle. It appeared plainly from his conduct at this time that Paracelsus had the soul of a quack^ though he occupied a professorial chair. He again set out upon his travels, and wherever he went made the doctors his enemies by denouncing them and their system, and performing his "wonderful cures." At Salzburg this led to fatal conse- quences, for Paracelsus, after one of his tirades, was assailed by the doctors' servants, pitched out of the window at an inn, and had his neck broken by the fall. This happened in 1541. The impression which Paracelsus, in spite of his errors MEDICINE IN THE DARK AGES $5 and eccentricities, made upon the men of his time was due to his audacity in exposing the defects of the medical sys- tems then in vogue, and insisting on the merits of his own methods. The Galenic doctrine he denounced with unmiti- gated scorn, nor did he reverence the memory of Hippo- crates. The popular superstitions connected with medicine he brushed aside with a sweep of common sense. But he was more successful in demolishing old doctrines than in building up new. His own system, so far as it can now be ascertained, was extremely mystic and vague. One feature of it can be made out distinctly ; vis., that he regarded disease not as a mere change in humors of the body, but as an entity — an invading monster which must be driven out by a superior antagonistic power. Every disease, he maintained, has its own proper arcanum or antidote. With this doctrine he mixed up certain mystic notions about the "spirit" of the remedy, which, however, are somewhat akin to the homoeopathic doctrine of dynamization. To hit upon the antidote for each disease, Paracelsus main- tained that the physician should have a knowledge of phil- osophy, astronomy, and alchemy; but of the meanings which he attached to these words, the limits of this paper forbid detailed explanations. Suffice it to say that by philosophy he meant the powers of nature ; by astronomy, the relations of the heavenly bodies to the human constitution; and by alchemy, virtually pharmaceutical chemistry, which pro- vided, as he thought, antidotes to disease in great number. His principal remedies were, however, mercury, opium, and antimony, which still play an important part in medical practise. Whether any single medicine, or a compound of several, constituted his elixir vitcE, is not so certain as that it failed to prolong the life of those who trusted in it. DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE BY JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE CHAPTER I LEARNING AND LITERATURE TjHE youngest of the three learned professions, medi- I cine, is, in England at least, so comparatively mod- ern that the student can survey its course from the period when it first became in this country a regu- larly organized and authorized vocation. In times prior to this period there were of course healers amongst us, men who in their learning betrayed by turns the influence of Northern leech-lore and Southern science, and who in prac- tise claimed and received the consideration accorded to them by the son of Syrach, when he wrote the familiar words : "Honor a physician with the honor due unto him ; for the uses which you may have of him ; for the Lord hath created him ; for of the Most High cometh healing, and he shall re- ceive honor of the king," words which John Whitefoot, the Norfolk rector, in his "Minutes of the Life of Sir Thomas Browne," says he would have taken for his text had he been appointed to preach the funeral sermon of the famous Nor- wich physician who gave a grateful world the "Religio Medici," and received the dignity of knighthood from Charles the Second. Long before the revival of letters, and longer yet before the science resulting from that revival^ it was rare for an English town of any considerable importance to be without a physician who held his head above his professional com- petitors on the strength of having studied at Oxford or Cambridge, or graduated at Paris or Bologna. With his gown of "sanguyn and perse," lined with taffeta and sendal, the doctor, who loved the gold he won in the black sickness, 6o DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL and knew more of astrology and magic than the Bible, shows forth bravely to this hour amongst Chaucer's throng of jolly pilgrims. Mediaeval England also produced doctors, who, wandering to foreign schools after the fashion of their time, rose to affluence and fame in the lands they visited for learning's sake. John Phreas, the fellow of Balliol, some of whose letters are preserved at the Bodleian, went to Padua for knowledge, and tarried in Italy till he had won the favor of powerful churchmen. For dedicating his transla- tion of Diodorus Siculus to Paul the Second he was re- warded with a gift that cost him his life — the bishopric, which he had barely accepted from the pontiff when he was poisoned by a disappointed candidate for the preferment. It is thus that biography accounts for the doctor's disappear- ance from the world at the moment of his elevation. But in days when no one could be eminent without living in per- petual dread of the poisoner ; and dish-covers, instead of being invented to keep the heat in steaming viands, were invented to guard the savory messes from the poisons which might otherwise be thrown upon them as they went from the kitchen to the table, people were so quick to assign every mysterious death to the most odious kind of assassination, that readers may doubt whether John Phreas really fell a victim to any such outbreak of satanic fury. But though there were physicians before Linacre, even as Agamemnon was preceded by many heroes, the medical profession, so far as England is concerned, may be said to have come into existence shortly after a famous doctor pre- vailed on John Chambre, Fernandus de Victoria, Nicholas Halswell, John Fraunces, and Robert Yaxley to join with him in a petition to Henry VIII. for letters patent, establish- ing a college with power to enact laws for the regulation of all doctors practising within London and seven miles thereof, and all practitioners of the physic throughout the kingdom, with the exception of those who were graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. Even as the legal profession dates from the lawyers' set- tlement in the Inns of Court, the medical profession dates DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 6i from the institution of the College of Physicians. The scheme that had this memorable result was prepared in Lin- acre's house in Knightrider Street, Doctor's Commons, and it was in accordance with Cardinal Wolsey's care for learn- ing and taste for founding colleges that he favored the pro- ject, and espoused it so far as to join in the prayer for the letters patent. It would have been strange had the sov- ereign hesitated to grant the request so commended to his consideration. Endowed by its founder's generosity with sufficient rooms in his own house, that ere long displayed on its wall the Physicians' Arms, devised and granted by Gar- ter King-at-Arms, the new college had Linacre for its first president. A fitter man for the office could not have been found than the courtly doctor who possessed the king's con- fidence, and the elegant writer who enjoyed the friendship of Erasmus. Linacre had, moreover, other titles to the homage of his contemporaries. Dr. John Kaye (Caius), whose concern for culture survives to this day in the college created by his wealth at Cambridge, avoided the usual and pardonable fault of epitaph-writers, when, without a word of excessive eulogy, he wrote on the first president's tomb: "Detesting deceits and tricks, faithful to his friends, be- loved by all men, ordained a priest some years before his death, he passed from this life full of years and much la- mented." Linacre's motive for taking holy orders toward the close of his career is unknown, but his character pre- cludes the suspicion that he was ambitious of the distinction to which John Phreas attained. In this particular his conduct is the more remarkable, because it is recorded of him that, though abounding in the Christian graces, he perused the Testament for the first time only a short while before his death, when he was so surprised at the discrepancy between the doctrine and practise of persons professing Christianity, that he exclaimed with fervor on laying down the sacred volume, "Either this is not the Gospel or we are not Chris- tians." The state of medicine in Henry VIII.'s England may be inferred from the passages of the letters patent for estab- 62 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL lishing Linacre's college, which declare that heretofore a multitude of ignorant persons^ the greater part of whom had no insight into physic or any other kind of learning, were the usual advisers of the sick at moments of urgent peril, "so far forth that common artificers, as smiths, weav- ers, and women, boldly and accustomably took upon them great cures, to the high displeasure of God and destruction of many of the king's liege people." Nor was the ignorance confined to practitioners who could not have read a verse to save themselves from the halter. In truth the Tudors had long perished from reigning houses before the sick had better reason for trusting many a stately court doctor than a rustic dealer in simples. An author of delightful books, William Bulleyn — a doctor of high repute in the reigns of our Sixth Edward and his sisters — dosed his patients with "electuaries" and "precious waters," compounded in ways as wonderful as their ingredients were numerous. For the preparation of his celebrated "Electuarium de Gemmis" he says, with the seriousness suitable to a philosopher: "Take two drachms of white perles ; two little peeces of saphyre ; jacinth, corneline, emerauldes, granettes, of each an ounce ; setwal, the sweate roote doronike, the rind of pomecitron, mace, basel seede, of each two drachms ; of redde corall, amber, shaving of ivory, of each two drachms ; rootes both of white and red behen, ginger, long pepper^ spicknard, folium indicum, saflfron, cardamon, of each one drachm ; of troch, diarodon, lignum aloes, of each half a small hand- ful ; cinnamon, galinga, zurubeth, which is a kind of setwal, of each one drachm and a half ; thin peeces of gold and silver, of each half a scruple ; of musk, half a drachm. Make your electuary with honey emblici, which is the fourth kind of mirobolans with roses, strained in equall partes, as much as will suffice. This healeth cold diseases of ye brain, harte, stomacke. It is a medicine proved against the tremblynge of the harte, faynting and souning, the weaknes of the stom- acke, pensivenes, solitarines. Kings and noble men have used this for their comfort. It causeth them to be bold- spirited, the body to smell wel, and ingendreth to the face DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 63 good coloure." When such a mess was served to kings and princes to give them lightness of heart, personal fra- grance, and a clear complexion^ cheaper and more nauseous messes of half a hundred incongruous ingredients were forced down the throats of the populace to bring them round from the ague or typhus. Following Bulleyn, at a distance of two generations, Theo- dore Turquet de Mayerne shows by his prescriptions with what little science a man of fine presence, worldly tact, and agreeable manner could rise to the highest honors of the medical profession in the seventeenth century. Dying at Chelsea in 1655, when he was buried in the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields — the same church in which John Hun- ter found his Urst grave in the present century — Sir Theo- dore Mayerne of England (Baron Aulbone of France), dur- ing the long career which closed in his eighty-second year, prescribed for almost as many sovereigns and other supreme personages as Sir Henry Holland doctored two centuries later. A court doctor in France, he was also a court doctor in London. Henry IV. and Louis XHL of France, and James L and Charles L of England, one and all put forth their tongues at the request of this superlatively fortunate practitioner, who in time prior to the Restoration saw our Second Charles through more than one illness. And yet his prescriptions provoke astonishment and laughter in this comparatively enlightened age. A sot on principle, Mayerne recommended his patients to fortify their constitutions by a monthly excess in wine and food, and when this regimen gave them a smart attack of gout he came to their relief with his famous gout powder that contained, with other things no less salutary, "the raspings of a human skull un- buried." For the benefit of hypochondriacal suflferers the doctor invented his "balsam of bats," an elegant preparation made of adders, bats, sucking whelps, earth-worms, hog's lard, stag's marrow, and stuff from the bones of oxen. When the gout powder and balsam of bats failed of the desired effect he had recourse to amulets and charms. Living in the time of Sir Theodore Mayerne's brightest celebrity, it is not 64 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL wonderful that Lord Bacon wrote slightingly of medicine as "a science which had been more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced, the labour having been more In circle than in progressions." Possibly May- erne's success and methods were not absent from the great philosopher's mind when, in the "Advancement of Learn- ing," after speaking of medicine as an art that "being con- jectural, hath made so much the more place to be left for imposture," he added: "Nay, we see the weakness and credulity of men is such as they will often prefer a mounte- bank or witch before a learned physician." In the seventeenth century and earlier time the mounte- banks of medicine were not confined to the pretenders, who, vending nostrums in markets and fairs from a raised bench, attracted the multitude with the facetious speeches and antics that caused them to be known as Merry Andrews. The more fortunate charlatans drove quite as brave coaches, wore quite as impressive wigs, and lived in quite as fine houses as the best and most respectable of the regular doctors. They were quite as often in the houses of the great, and on easy terms with supereminent statesmen. And whilst the trick- sters could thus compete with honest physicians, who did much for their patients' welfare and no little for the advance- ment of medical knowledge, it was not rare for a doctor, holding a diploma of the college, and knowing as much as any of the orthodox faculty, to ingratiate himself with the popu- lace by imitating these mountebanks, who were nothing better than mere mountebanks. In truth, the term Merry Andrew (a term synonymous with mountebank) comes to us from a curious character of the sixteenth century, who, though he was a considerable scholar, an able physician (as physic went in those days), a subtle political agent, and a reverend priest, did not deem it inconsistent with his dignity to dress like a harlequin, blow a trumpet from a grotesquely painted car, and talk merry nonsense and clever ribaldry for the hour together from a public platform to a crowd of gap- ing rustics or saucy citizens, in order that he might drive a better trade in pills and potions with his delighted auditors. DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 65 Whilst a paper still preserved amongst our public records points to the political services rendered to Henry VIII.'s Cromwell by "Andrew Boorde, priest," William BuUeyn's "Dialogue between Soarnes and Chirugi" bears a testimony that this same Andrew Boorde — the father of the "Merry Andrews" — "wrote wel of physicke to profit the common wealth withal." But though medicine made but slow progress from the establishment of Linacre's college to the time when Bacon wrote on the advancement of learning, and from the period in which Mayerne treated hypochondria and gout with bat- balsam and powder of human bones to the time when Syden- ham, during his frequent attacks of gout, used to sit at an open window of his house in St. James's Square, swilling small beer out of a silver tankard, under the impression that it was the most cooling and in every respect most salutary beverage for sufferers from his particular malady, it must not be imagined that nothing was being done to raise medi- cine from the darkness of mediaeval quackery, and relieve it of the censure passed upon it by so competent a critic as Francis Bacon. Three years before Mayerne's death, the College of Physicians placed in their hall a statue to a doctor who survived Mayerne by two years and three months — ^the acute observer of whom it was written : The circling streams, once thought but pools of blood (Whether life's fuel or the body's food), From dark oblivion Harvey's name shall save. A great man is never alone in his greatness. He may have overtopped and surpassed his contemporaries, but on inquiry he will be always found to have companions who resembled him in ability and purpose, in the characteristics of their endowments and the ends for which they employed them. The elite of Harvey's medical contemporaries resem- bled him in being Baconian observers ; and they have been followed by the steadily-growing army of observers and rea- soners who, working on the Baconian method, gathered the facts and arrived at the conclusion which enable the present (6 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL practitioners of medicine to detect the nature of hidden disease so precisely, to foretell its course so accurately, and treat it at every turn so effectively. To those physicians of olden time and their successors it is due that in this happier age the poorest peasant of a petty hamlet has at his sick-bed a medical attendant more intelligent within the lines of his peculiar calling and more capable of combating the ailments to which humanity is liable, than any of the doctors who quickened Charles II.'s final sufferings, or, thronging round Queen Anne's death-bed, pelted one another with sarcastic speeches. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that if he wrote slightingly of their special science and remedial processes. Bacon had the highest respect for the intelligence and cul- ture of the physicians with whom he came in contact, and for their discretion on matters outside the province of their particular calling. Speaking of the diverse acquirements and capabilities of the Elizabethan physicians, he says, "For you shall have of them antiquaries, poets, humanists, statesmen, merchants, divines." Such testimony from so impressive a witness would by itself save us from the mistake of judging these doctors by their prescriptions. But there is a re- dundance of corroborative evidence that, whilst their theory and practise in professional matters accorded with prevailing opinion, they went with the men of light and leading on all other subjects. The story of Sir Kenelm Digby's Sympathetic Powder enables us, whilst reviewing the science and practise of the doctors of the seventeenth century, to realize what their more educated patients believed or were ready to believe re- specting disease and its treatment. Sir Kenelm made his celebrated powder in the following manner : After dissolv- ing vitrol in warm water he filtered this solution, and left it in the air to evaporate till a thin scum appeared on the surface. Closely covered, this solution was kept in a cool place for two or three days, when it precipitated fair green crystals, that were exposed in a large flat earthen dish to the heat of the sun in the dog-days till the sun calcined them. DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 6^ When thus calcined they were roughly powdered, and again exposed to the sun for further calcination, and put again in the mortar for further trituration. This treatment was re- peated till the crystals were reduced to the finest possible powder, which possessed truly marvelous properties. Good for many things, it was especially efficacious for the cure of wounds. If a piece of a wounded man's raiment, stained with blood from the wound, were dipped in water holding some of this miraculous powder in solution, the wound of the injured person forthwith began to heal — it mattered not how long a time had elapsed since the infliction of the wound, or how far the sufferer was away from the place where the bit of blood-stained raiment was placed in the sympathetic solution. The patient might be dying in Paris or Madrid, and the piece of stained linen or velvet might be operated upon in London. It was not needful that the patient should place faith in the remedy, or even that he should know how his cure was being compassed at the distance of a thousand, or any number of thousands of miles. Coming accidentally on two of his friends when they were fighting a duel with swords, James Howel, the author of the "Dendrologia," with excellent motives and inconvenient consequences, in- terposed between the combatants and tried to separate them. The immediate result of this interference was that Mr. Howel retired from the field with his hands badly cut by the swords of the belligerents. Five days later, when his hands were in so bad a way that the surgeons feared the wounds would gangrene, Mr. Howel had recourse to Sir Kenelm Digby, the knight whom his eulogists delighted to term "a gentleman absolute in all numbers," whatever that may mean. Taking from his visitor a garter stained with blood from the wounded hands, Sir Kenelm, without letting the sufferer know or suspect what was about to be done, threw the article of costume into a vessel that contained some of the vitriolic solution. The cure worked instantaneously. "What ails you?" cried Sir Kenelm, seeing his patient start with a look of mingled surprise and gratification. "I know not how it has come about, but all the pain has 68 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL left my hands," was the answer. "Methinks that a pleasing kind of freshness, as it were a cold napkin, has replaced the inflammation that a minute since was tormenting me." "Good," rejoined the knight absolute in all numbers. "Then throw away the medicaments and plaisters, and only see that you keep the wounds clean." Instead of going home like a prudent invalid, Mr. Howel forthwith ran about the town, telling his acquaintances of the marvelous affair. Catching the gossip of the courtiers, the Duke of Buckingham hastened to Sir Kenelm Digby to ascertain the exact truth of the matter. After entertaining the duke with dinner. Sir Kenelm, to demonstrate the power of his powder, took the garter out of the solution, and in his grace's presence dried it before the fire. Scarcely was it dry, when Mr. Howel's servant ran into the room with the announcement that his master's hands were worse than ever — ay, were burning as though they were placed between coals of fire. The servant having been dismissed with an assurance that on returning to his master he would find his wounds painless and free from inflammation, Sir Kenelm put the garter back in the solution, with a result altogether sat- isfactory to Mr. Howel and his servant. During the next six days there was little talk in the best houses of James I.'s London on any subject but Mr. Howel's case and Sir Kenelm's powder. King James required a series of bulletins, giving him quick intelligence of every change in the pa- tient's state ; and on the completion of the cure his Majesty successfully besought Sir Kenelm to tell him how the powder was made. If he is to be trusted, Sir Kenelm learnt how to make the sympathetic vitriol from a French philosopher, who described the process in an oration delivered to "a sol- emn assembly of nobles and learned men at Montpellier in France." Whatever the confidence or distrust to which the knight is entitled, it is certain that for a time educated Eng- lish people believed in Sir Kenelm and his powder quite as readily and generally as uneducated people of the present time believe in any imposture of the hour which tickles and fascinates them. DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 69 The evidence is superabundant that, whilst they merely- resembled their most intelligent patients in credulity on matters pertaining to medicine, the doctors of former gen- erations, in respect to mental activity and general culture, were in harmony with the brightest and choicest spirits of their times. No small part of our literary annals relates to the dignity of physicians, their scholarly doings, and their affectionate intimacy with the men who gave us our best literature. If Caius figures ludicrously in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," Dr. Butts (the first of our medical knights) plays no unworthy part in Shakespeare's "Henry the Eighth." Bulleyn, Gerard (the herbalist), and Turner are favorite authors with all who delight in our earlier printed literature. Though he provoked the censures of Sir Kenelm Digby, whose "Observations upon the Religio Medici" were properly described by Coleridge as the ob- servations of a pedant, Sir Thomas Browne's writings still command the grateful consideration of liberal and judicious students. Before earning imperishable celebrity by his phi- losophical essays, John Locke followed the profession of medicine. Though the verses, which he composed to the rolling of his chariot wheels, stirred the derision of the wits, Sir Richard Blackmore's poetry ceases to be discreditable when it is regarded as the mere pastime of a busy doctor. Though he was the subject of the stinging epigram : For Physic and farces His equal there scarce is; His farces are physic, His physic a farce is, Sir John Hill produced some useful books, one of which ran through dozens of editions, and became so universally and enduringly famous, that it may without exaggeration be de- clared to live to this hour on the lips of educated people. Sydenham had a wider knowledge of literature than is imagined by the many persons who remember him chiefly by the piquant speech with which he avoided Blackmore's application for advice respecting the course of study by 70 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL which he might hope to raise himself from the discredit of being an unsuccessful schoolmaster to the honor that eventually covered him as a successful physician. "Read 'Don Quixote,' it is a very good book ; I read it still," said the great doctor, who had been in his earlier time a captain of cavalry, and was indebted in no small degree for his sub- sequent eminence to the knowledge of the world that had come to him in mihtary service. Probably there was no more truth in Radcliffe's avowal of a contemptuous disregard for Hippocrates than in Syden- ham's affectation of owing his medical success to Cervantes. When Radcliffe, towards the close of his inordinately suc- cessful career, made his first call on the young physician who succeeded to the greater part of his practise, he is said to have caught Mead reading Hippocrates. "Umph! Do you read Hippocrates in Greek?" asked the visitor, in a tone implying no growth of kindly feeling for the young man who spent his leisure so unprofitably. "Occasionally," answered Mead, making the least of his misdemeanor by the tone in which he uttered the discreetly chosen word. "Umph ! I never read a line from him in any language," growled the great man. "You, sir, have no occasion ; you are Hippocrates him- self," returned the aspirant to professional eminence, seeing almost in the same moment that the compliment had taken the desired effect. It was by such affectation that Radcliffe acquired the dis- repute which caused Garth to exclaim that for Radcliffe to leave his money to create a library was as though an eunuch should found a seraglio. It is not to be supposed that the physician who had held a Lincoln fellowship, and in his earlier time at Oxford became the senior scholar of Uni- versity College, was unable to read Greek, or that a man of his energy and acuteness was really satisfied with a room of study that contained nothing more notable than the few vials, the skeleton, and the herbal, to which he called Dr. Bathurst's attention, exclaiming boastfully, "This is Rad- DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 71 cliffe's library." Nor was the affectation of scholastic ig- norance his only or most unpleasant affectation. Capable of munificence, it pleased him to pretend that he was a miser. By no means deficient in kindness, he liked to persuade the world that he was wanting in common humanity. Not de- void of magnanimity, he delighted in playing the cynic, even in his least austere moods, as when he exclaimed to his pe- culiar favorite of all the rising doctors, "Mead, I love you, and I'll tell you a sure secret to make your fortune ; use all mankind ill." In his kindlier moments a man of cordial manner and pleasant address, he was a byword alike amongst his personal acquaintances and those who knew him only by report for insolence of bearing and brutality of speech. No wonder that the man who was at so much pains to misrep- resent himself was almost universally misunderstood. No wonder that Mandeville mistook him for an extravagant caricature of all that is most sordid and despicable in human nature, and attributed to vulgar vanity the will that gave Oxford the library, the infirmary, the observatory, and the traveling fellowships that bear the physician's name. No wonder also, as insolence is apt to provoke insolence, that this overbearing doctor often met his match and something more than his match in incivility. When they squabbled about the door in the wall that separated their contiguous gardens in Bow Street, Radcliffe received a Roland for his Oliver from Sir Godfrey Kneller, to whom he sent a ser- vant with the order, "Tell Sir Godfrey that he may do what he likes with the door so long as he doesn't paint it." "Go back," said the artist, with admirable humor and perfect good-humor, "and, giving my service to Dr. Radcliffe, tell him I'll take anything from him — except his physic." Even happier was the retort of the Irish pavior to the torrent of abuse poured upon him by the irascible physician for what he thought bad workmanship on the pavement before his house. "What, you rascal," cried the doctor, "have you the impudence to demand payment for such work? You have spoiled my pavement, you scoundrel, and then covered the •J2 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL stones with earth to hide the bad work." "F faith, yer honor," the workman repHed, "it isn't for yer honor to say that mine is the only bad work the earth hides." Samuel Johnson was of opinion that little good had come of the traveling fellowships. "I know," he said to Boswell, "noth- ing that has been imported by them." But if they have done little good, it is as certain as aught in human affairs that they were founded in the hope of doing good. Writing under provocation given him by the subject of his censure, Mandeville may be pardoned for misjudging the physician, but at this distance from the time when the doctor's caustic tongue made him an army of enemies, no generous nature will concur in the philosopher's opinion of the bequests to Oxford. It is the easier to pardon Radcliffe's manifold offenses against good feeling and his neglect of elegant letters, be- cause he was surrounded and followed by physicians abun- dantly careful for the amenities of life and at the same time honorably remembered for literary services redounding to the honor of their profession. Garth, Freind, Hans Sloane, Arbuthnot, Mead, Akenside, Armstrong, Grainger, Monsey, and Lettsom are among the most prominent of the long list of scholarly physicians who, between the close of the seven- teenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, bright- ened London literary cliques, and made a single brotherhood of our men of letters and followers of medicine. If Oliver Goldsmith was not a physician he was enough of a doctor to be named with the poets of the medical profession. Smol- lett's title to be rated with the faculty, or, rather, the doc- tors' claim to the honor of rating him as one of themselves, is still stronger. Of this throng of doctors who lived in familiar intercourse with the famous writers who were wits without being physi- cians, no one is remembered more agreeably than Samuel Garth, who, in "The Dispensary," a poem that, claiming some consideration on the score of its literary merits, claims a larger measure of respect as an entertaining memorial of DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 73 the fiercest controversy of our medical annals, wrote of his professional contemporaries and their college: Not far from that most celebrated place Where angry justice shows her awful face. Where little villains must submit to fate That great ones may enjoy the- world in state. There stands a dome, majestic to the sight, And sumptuous arches bear its oval height; A golden globe, placed high with artful skill, Seems, to the distant sight, a gilded pill. The pile was, by the pious patron's aim, Raised for a use as noble as its frame, Nor did the learned society decline The propagation of that great design; In all her mazes Nature's face they viewed. And, as she disappeared, their search pursued. Wrapt in the shade of night, the goddess lies, Yet to the learned unveils her dark disguise. And shuns the gross access of vulgar eyes. To view what remains of this stately pile the reader of this page must make an excursion to Warwick Lane. Built after the Great Fire of London, that burnt the doctors out of their home at Amen Corner, whither the faculty moved on finding Linacre's old house in Knightrider Street too narrow for their growing dignity and necessities, the col- lege, with its dome and sumptuous arches, and all its struc- tural appurtenances, passed into the hands of the butchers of Newgate Market on the migration of the physicians to their present mansion in Pall Mall East, a fate that in the opinion of some persons would have more appropriately be- fallen the old Surgeons' Hall in the same quarter of the town. Since the butchers entered into possession, the place has doubtless heard more noise than it ever heard whilst it was the abode of science, but it can scarcely have sheltered fiercer disputants since 1825 than those who raised their voices in its chambers during the dispensarian controversy. Never has fiercer contention arisen from so small a cause. At first the only matter in dispute was whether the physi- cians should open a dispensary on their premises, and, pre- 74 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL scribing for the poor without fee, should sell them the pre- scribed medicines at cost price. The proposal, with all its appearance of reasonable and praiseworthy benevolence, cannot be said to have proceeded from unalloyed charity. From the date of its erection in 1670, some of the physicians had regarded the Apothecaries' Hall in Water Lane with suspicion and bitterness. It was whispered amongst the graduates of the college that the tradesmen of the hall were growing too powerful, were en- croaching on the privileges of the faculty, and were daily growing more rebellious against the wholesome government of their superiors in Warwick Lane. It could not be denied that, without any license sought from or granted by the college, the vendors of drugs had assumed to themselves a right to prescribe for the poorer sort of patients, albeit apothecaries were instituted for no other purpose than to dispense the prescriptions of regular physicians and col- legiate licentiates at charges fixed by the college. It was averred by the doctors who disliked the hall that the apothecaries charged the poor so heavily for dispensing phy- sicians' prescriptions as to render it impossible for the in- digent sick to procure the medicines so prescribed. Under these circumstances it was proposed by the physicians, who soon became known as dispensarians, to open a dispensary in the place and for the purpose already stated. Styling themselves anti-dispensarians, the physicians who opposed the project maintained with a fervor which would have been excessive had the welfare of the whole nation depended on the issue of the contest, that the dispensarians were actu- ated by an ignoble jealousy of the apothecaries, made charity a stalking-horse to their selfishness and spite, and aimed at degrading the college into an association of tradesmen. Of course the dispensarians retorted that their opponents within the college were truckling to and currying favor with the powerful apothecaries. It was no mere quarrel between two sets of physicians, for the apothecaries insisted on being heard on a matter affecting their interests and honor. It was a nice row, a triangular duel between the dispensarian ^^^'-T' S OLD em the t>'^- >3t price. 1 the date of its erection in ered ai; raduates of the college that the growing too powerful, were en- .-„.-s of the faculty, and were daily v.s against the wholesome government m Warwick Lane. It could not be denied license sought from or granted by the M?i^ Jenner t,,^ the in- * * ' Under . ns, who known as di : dispensary maintained with a fervor which would have '. the welfare _, J contest, tha..- -,---- -.... • ignoble jealousy of the apothecaries, made charity se to their selfishness and spite, and aimed at college into an association of tradesmen. Of oensarians retorted that their opponents within the c truckling to and currying favor with the ?. It was no mere quarrel between for the apothecaries insisted on being ig their interests and honor. ^^ .4 nice iow, ; ^uel between the dispensarian DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 75 doctors, the anti-dispensarian doctors, and the apothecaries. Pamphlets in prose, pamphlets in verse, broadsides, squibs, caricatures, appeared on the burning questions. Sir Richard Blackstone was an anti-dispensarian — a fact that would have decided Sir Samuel Garth to join the dispensarians, had he not been in their confidence from the first. Stranger even than the heat into which the doctors worked themselves, was the degree in which the public sympathized with the fury of the faculty, siding now with the one and now with the other set of disputants. Sir Samuel Garth's poem had no sooner appeared on the bookstalls than it was seen in the hands of every modish spark and every woman of fashion. Ceasing for the moment to care whether their friends were Whigs or Tories, men and women of quality were only desirous that their friends should be sound and staunch on the medical question. Pope, of course, held with Garth, the beloved doctor to whom he dedicated the second pastoral with the lines : Accept, O Garth, the Muse's early lays, That adds this wreath of ivy to thy bays; Hear what from love unpractised hearts endure, From love, the sole disease thou canst not cure, — ^the beloved doctor of whom he wrote, when death had divided them, "If ever there was a good Christian, without knowing himself to be so, it was Dr. Garth." How cor- dially the poet adopted the cause and prejudices and pas- sions of his medical friends against the apothecaries, is shown also by the lines of the "Essay on Criticism": Then Criticism the Muse's handmaid proved, To dress her charms and make her more beloved; But following wits from that intention strayed. Who could not win the mistress, woed the maid; Against the poets their own arms they turned, Sure to hate most the men from whom they learned. So modern 'Pothecaries taught the art By Doctors' bills to play the Doctor's part, Bold in the practise of mistaken rules, Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools. Garth, moreover, was only one of a bevy of doctors grace- 76 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL fully commemorated in the poems of the Twickenham bard, who honored them none the less because, in the life that was one long disease, he needed their ministrations at every turn. "I'll do," he wrote— What Mead and Cheselden advise, To keep these limbs and to preserve these eyes. Mead, of whom Dr. Johnson remarked that he "lived more in the broad sunshine of life than almost any man," was singularly fortunate in having Pope for his admirer at the outset, and Johnson for his eulogist in the close of his career. If he could not stoop to the arts of the flatterer, Johnson delighted in giving sincere praise, and in clothing it with the language most likely to render it acceptable to its object. When James needed the aid of a master of style for the composition of the dedicatory letter that should dis- pose Mead to regard the "Medicinal Dictionary" with favor, he did well to seek Johnson, whose cordial enjoyment of the task makes itself felt in stately periods of the epistle. Sir — That the "Medicinal Dictionary" is dedicated to you is to be imputed only to your reputation for superior skill in those sci- ences which I have endeavoured to explain and to facilitate ; and you are, therefore, to consider the address, if it be agreeable to you, as one of the rewards of merit ; and, if otherwise, as one of the incon- veniences of eminence. However you shall receive it, my design cannot be disappointed, because this public appeal to your judgment will show that I do not found my hopes of approbation upon the ignorance of my read- ers, and that I fear his censure least whose knowledge is the most extensive. I am, sir, your most obedient and humble servant, R. James. There is no need to inquire in what regard the physician held the "Medicinal Dictionary," thus introduced to his notice by a man of letters who, far from confining his grati- tude for medical service to services rendered by physicians, honored his apothecary with a poem. CHAPTER II THE POLITICIANS N 1745 — the year so fruitful of dismay to the Jaco- bites and of discomfort to the most cautious adher- ents of an irretrievably routed party — Dr. Beau- ford was summoned before the Privy Council to answer searching questions respecting his intercourse with his Jacobite patients, and more particularly respecting his confidential dealings with Lord Barrymore. But the physi- cian proved so equal to the occasion that he soon made the lords of the Council think they might as well tell him to go about his business. "You know Lord Barrymore ?" asked one of the lords. "Intimately — most intimately," answered the doctor, in the tone of a man bent on making a clean breast and full confession. "You are continually with him?" "We dine together almost daily when his lordship is in town," replied the witness, with a growing air of eager frankness. "What do you talk about?" "Eating and drinking, my lord." "And what else?" "Well, my lord," was the answer, preluded by a smile that, promising some startling revelation, seemed to indi- cate the doctor's inability to fence with so direct a ques- tioner, "we talk about — drinking and eating." "Ay, ay, but what else ?" "What else, my lord !" replied the physician, with a deli- cious assumption of simplicity and astonishment ; "we never talk of anything but eating and drinking and drinking and eating." It may be taken for granted that when the two friends yS DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL pledged "the King" in their cups, they did not drink to King George, and that gossip about cookery was seasoned with piquant talk in vindication of their "principles," and to the discredit of Hanoverian traitors. Dr. Beauford lived in times when politicians were noth- ing when they were not "thorough," and doctors without political convictions and the courage to proclaim them could not hope to have many patients. One of Beauford's pro- fessional contemporaries was Dr. Barrowby — the lively wit who all the year round would sooner sacrifice a mere ac- quaintance than a good jest, and in seasons of hotly-con- tested elections would throw his best friend over to do his party a good turn. Barrowby (not Abernethy, as the blun- derers insist) was the doctor who, whilst canvassing for a place on the staff of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, converted a powerful well-wisher into a vehement opponent by a droll freak of humorous insolence. "Well, friend, what is your business?" asked the Snow Hill grocer, strutting up the shop, which Barrowby had en- tered because the tradesman was a governor of the hospital. Offended by the pompous and patronizing air of the man, who obviously hoped for more than his proper meed of civility, Barrowby, instead of suing for his vote and influ- ence, fixed him with a keen glance, and then answered, slowly, "I want a pound of plums. Be good enough to put them up quickly." Barrowby's political fervor displayed itself characteristic- ally in 1749 at the Westminster election, when Lord Tren- tham and Sir George Vandeput fought for the vacant seat with the vehemence expected of Westminster candidates in the good old times. Joe Weatherby. the whilom notorious landlord of the Ben Jonson's Head in Russell Street, was sick even to death, whilst the talk of his neighbors all turned on the chances of the two rival politicians, and mis- led by the language of Mrs. Weatherby, who was inces- santly lamenting her husband's inability from sickness to record his vote for Lord Trentham, Barrowby (in at- tendance on the invalid) had declared that for Joe in his DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 79 perilous condition to go to the polling booth would be for him to drive the last nail into his coffin. Under these cir- cumstances, Barrowby, on paying his patient a visit, on the last polling day, was not a little astonished to find him up and dressed and ready for a drive to his proper booth. "What are you after?" cried Barrowby. "I am going to poll," Joe answered faintly. "To poll ! You are mad ! Get to bed instantly. I won't stand by and let you kill yourself." "Dear Doctor," the fever-stricken patient pleaded, "let me have my wish. Now that my wife has gone out for the day I should like to get as far as Covent Garden and vote for Sir George." "How, Joe, what d'you mean? Sir George?" "Yes, sir, my mistress is all for his lordship, but I am a Vandeput man." The case was altered. Seeing a sudden change for the better in his patient, Barrowby exclaimed, "Wait a minute, nurse. You needn't be in such haste to pull ofif his stock- ings. Here, Joe, let's feel your pulse. One, two, three — 'pon my honor, Joe, it's a good pulse ; it's much firmer than it was yesterday ; it beats like a hammer. Those new pills have done you a vast deal of good. You're another man." "Sure I am, doctor," rejoined Joe imploringly, "and I should so like to vote for Sir George." "Well, Joe," returned the doctor, after a moment's con- sideration, "as you are so bent on going to this election it would be a pity for you to be disappointed. It's a fine day, and the drive may do you good. So as it's to be done let it be done quickly. Here, my good fellow, be quick now that Mrs. Weatherby is out of the way. I will take you to Co- vent Garden in my chariot, and bring you back in ten minutes." Delighted with his doctor's condescension, Weatherby went off to Covent Garden, like a gentleman, voted on the "right side/' returned to his house in triumph, and died two hours afterwards, sinking rapidly under the reproaches of his wife and her friends of the Court party. 8b DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL The manner of Barrowby's death was as remarkable as that of the patient for whose demise he was perhaps less ac- countable than people imagined. Called away to a patient from a party, where he had been talking and laughing with even more than his usual vivacity, the too light-hearted phy- sician stepped into the chariot that had taken Joe Weatherby to Covent Garden. A few minutes later, on opening the door of the carriage, the doctor's footman found his master dead from a stroke of apoplexy. The Catholics of the seventeenth century were in no small degree responsible for the political zeal that for successive generations distinguished the leaders of the medical pro- fession, alike in London and the chief provincial towns. It is certain that when they could no longer correspond secretly by means of their priests, the Catholic families availed themselves of their doctors as agents for clandestine intercommunication. Certain also is it that in times prolific of politico-religious dissensions the other religious parties followed the example set them by the Catholics, till it came to be taken as a matter of course that a successful physician was a political partisan. Charles II. may have exaggerated the activity and influence of the faculty in the intrigues of parties, but he had grounds for declaring that Dr. Lower, Nell Gwynn's physician, did more mischief than a troop of horses. Whilst Lower held the confidence of the Whigs, Thomas Short was the physician in whom the Catholics of Charles II.'s London delighted. When Lower had passed from the scenes of his political energy, his place was sup- plied by Garth, of whom Swift wrote in the "Journal to Stella" under date November 17th, 171 1, "This is Queen Elizabeth's birthday usually kept in town by apprentices, etc. ; but the Whigs designed a mighty procession by mid- night, and had laid out a thousand pounds to dress up the pope, devil, cardinals, Sacheverel, etc., and carry them with torches about and bum them. They did it by contribution. Garth gave five guineas ; Dr. Garth I mean, if ever you heard of him. But they were seized by order from the secretary. The figures are now at the secretary's office at Whitehall. DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 8i I design to see them if I can." Garth was followed by Mead, Mead by Monsey, and each of the three had medical con- temporaries, of whom it would be difficult to say whether they valued themselves chiefly for being eminent physicians or for being eminent Whigs. On the other side medical biography points to Radcliff e, Arbuthnot, Drake, and Freind. But of all the notable doctors of the Tory camp, Radcliffe was by far the most important and conspicuous personage — the most successful within the lines of his special calling, and the most powerful outside those lines. In politics Rad- cliflfe was thorough; even the Jacobites declared him account- able for Queen Anne's death, and denounced him as her "murderer." No one doubted that his heart was true to the "king over the water." He was too shrewd and robust a man, however, to yield to the sophistries and worldly sugges- tions by which Obadiah Walker thought to wheedle him into Romanism: "The advantages," he wrote to Walker in 1688 — year of sore trial to ambition and weak-kneed Protes- tants — "may be very great, for all that I know ; God Al- mighty can do much, and so can the king ; but you'll pardon me if I cease to speak like a physician for once, and with an air of gravity am very apprehensive that I may anger the one in being too complaisant to the other." But though he repelled thus firmly the man who had the king's favor, Rad- cliflFe cherished a generous affection for the master of Uni- versity, and displayed it with singular munificence and stead- iness when, driven from his college and fallen on evil days, the renegade had lost the power to push his friends' for- tunes. From the date of his withdrawal from Oxford, a broken and dishonored man. Walker subsisted on a handsome allowance from the money-loving doctor, who in later time defrayed the charges of his interment in St. Pancras church- yard, and years after his death placed a monument to his memory. It may not, however, be imagined that the political doc- tors of olden time found all their patients amongst those who agreed with them in politics. Mead was largely em- ployed by families that abhorred his party. Of the £7,000 83 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL (equal to £15,000 or ii6,ooo of Victorian money) which he earned in one of his most fortunate years, at least £2,000 came to him from the pockets of Tories. But Radcliffe was a still more remarkable example of a physician who despoiled his political adversaries in the way of professional service. Coming to town when Lower was falling out of favor with the Whigs, and Short was losing his hold on the Catholics, Radcliffe had not been long in London before Blackmore and Sir Edward Hannes had as much reason as Whistler and Sir Edmund King for being jealous of his success ; and in the days of his supremacy the overbearing and caustic doctor was employed by the Whigs whom he detested almost as much as by the Tories whom he approved. Certainly he was at small pains to conciliate the leaders of either party. When he told Mead to treat the world ill if he would have it treat him well, the dying doctor gave council in harmony with his own practise and experience. Many of the extrava- gant stories told of Abernethy's rudeness to his patients were altogether inappropriate to the great surgeon, who was by no means the savage he has been represented, but were pre- cisely true of the Jacobite physician who, on seeing WilHam IIL's dropsical ankles for the first time, exclaimed with brutal sincerity, "I would not have your Majesty's legs for your three kingdoms." Cynical and harsh to men, Radcliffe was no less sarcastic and disdainful to women. To a lady of high rank, whose speech caused him to think her a ro- mantic and fanciful creature, he remarked, "Phew, madam, you should curl your hair with a ballad." Perhaps it was to Radcliffe's credit that he was even less complaisant to gentlewomen of the highest quality than to gentlewomen of no quality in particular. The circumstances that resulted in his dismissal from the Princess Anne of Denmark's service show how little he humored the greatest of "the great." Shortly after Queen Mary's death, which was generally spoken of at the same time to his credit and discredit, he was sitting with some friends and wine in his favorite tavern, when a courtly messenger ran in upon him with a request that he would hasten to St. James's Palace to DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 83 prescribe for the Princess of Denmark, who was seriously indisposed. "Good Sir, tell her Highness I'll come when I have had another bottle," the doctor replied, in a voice audible, as it was intended to be, to the speaker's convivial companions and every one else in the coffee-room. A quarter of an hour later, when the equerry appeared with a still more urgent request that the physician would hasten to his august patient, who was momentarily getting worse, Radcliffe, under the influence of his second bottle, declared he should visit the Princess quite soon enough if he called on her next day, adding : "Tell her Royal Highness that her distemper is nothing but vapors. She's in as good a state of health as any woman breathing, only she can't make up her mind to be- lieve it." On the morrow, when he was met in an ante-room of the Princess's apartments in St. James's Palace with an an- nouncement that he had been dismissed from his post and succeeded in it by his rival, Dr. Gibbons, Radcliffe was seized with furious chagrin, that caused him to tell his pa- tients how atrociously he had been treated by the Princess, who had positively had the ingratitude to send for a doctor who would not condescend to visit her when she wished to see him. Of course, the physician who succeeded him in the Princess's confidence also came in for a liberal allowance of abuse from this extremely ill-used gentleman. Gibbons was an imbecile, a dolt, an old woman who could order slops and broths, and was really rather a clever hand at making diet-drinks, but knew no more than any other nurse of the science of medicine. Nurse Gibbons had got a new nursery to look after; Nurse Gibbons would soon find it no easy task to minister to her new mistress ; Nurse Gibbons was just fit to wait on a woman who fancied herself ill when she was strong as any horse ; Nurse Gibbons would be troubled how to please her new employer, who was no gentle- woman to take kindly to slops and diet-drinks. Neither at the moment of the rupture nor in later time did Radcliffe's exclusion from the Princess's household lower him in social regard or injure him in his practise. At the 84 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL moment when the town was laughing over his wild talk about Nurse Gibbons and the woman who suffered from "the vapors," the affair was talked of less to the physician's discredit than as an example of the Princess's want of dis- cretion. What prudent woman, princess or no princess, it was asked, would have quarreled with the doctor who was alike powerful to rescue Tories and Whigs from the jaws of death ? How could the matter affect the doctor injuriously in later time, when it was known that, though regard for her own dignity precluded her from recalling the physician who had treated her with such outrageous insolence, the august gentlewoman (as Princess and afterwards as Queen) used to order Gibbons's slops to be thrown into their appro- priate pail, and even authorized her ladies-in-waiting to consult Dr. Radcliffe about her health. Perhaps the most curious matter of the Jacobite doctor's strange story was that the superstitious respect in which he was held by the Whigs was coupled with a belief on their part that he often neglected to visit sick Whigs out of spite, and was, more- over, quite capable, after coming to their beds, of letting them die from pure malignity to their party, when he knew well how to save them. Often one heard it said of him, "He might have saved poor Tom if he had liked, only poor Tom was a Whig, and so he left him die." Queen Mary died because, though he came to her in her last sickness, he would not put out all his strength and "do all he knew" to save her. In a passage of his "History" — a passage with- held from the printed work but to be found in the Harleian MSS. — Bishop Burnet remarked, "I will not enter into an- other province, nor go out of my profession, and so will say no more of the physician's part, but that it was universally condemned, so that the Queen's death was imputed to the un- skilfulness and unwillingness of Dr. Radcliffe, an impious and vicious man, who hated the Queen much, but virtue and religion more. He was a professed Jacobite, and was by many thought a very bad physician, but others cried him up to the highest degree imaginable. He was called for, and it appeared that his opinion was depended on. Other physi- DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 85 cians were called in when it was too late." The reader may be left to imagine what preposterous things were believed and said by the multitude of the Jacobite doctor, when a man of Burnet's intelligence and culture could write in this strain of the Queen's chief medical attendant. The story of Radcliffe's murder of Queen Anne is even more amusing. When the Queen's "hour" was drawing nigh, the ladies, who had so often consulted about their mis- tress "under the rose," and half a hundred equally trans- parent and ridiculous artifices, v/ere urgent that the great physician — the only man able to recover her Majesty — should be openly sent for and entreated to dismiss his long- nursed animosity against his royal mistress, and out of his magnanimity to save her, the country, and the Jacobite party from imminent destruction. The advice of the ladies was so far taken that Lady Masham ventured to dispatch an equally urgent and conciliatory message to Radcliffe, then lying at his country house in Carshalton. But the doctor, already stricken with the mortal illness that killed him within three months of the Queen's death, could only answer that it was impossible for him to wait on her Majesty. The doctor's reply to Lady Masham's summons was regarded by the courtiers and gossips as the Queen's death-warrant. "She continued," Charles Ford wrote to Swift in the body of a letter that must have set the dean chuckling, "ill the whole day. In the evening I spoke to Dr. Arbuthnot, and he told me that he did not think her distemper was desperate. Rad- cliffe was sent for to Carshalton about noon by order of the Council, but said he had taken physic and could not come. In all probability he had saved her life, for I am told that the late Lord Gower had been often in the condition with the gout in the head, and Radcliffe kept him alive many years after." All the comedy of this epistle, written, any one would infer from the body of the document, after the Queen's death, is not apparent to the reader till he comes to the postscript, which gives the latest intelligence in these words: "The Queen is something better, and the Council again adjourned till eight in the morning." The Queen, 86 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL however, died on the following day, when murmurs were heard in every quarter of the town against the disloyal and impious physician who had lingered in the enjoyment of his rural retreat when by journeying to town he might have pro- longed her days and saved the country from the grasp of the Hanoverian faction. What wonder that the public exag- gerated the doctor's power in this manner when Arbuthnot, a Tory physician, could gravely tell Swift of the malicious delight taken by Radcliffe "in preserving my Lord Chief Justice Holt's wife, whom he attended out of spite to her husband, who wished her dead." For the moment the Whigs, who gained so much, and the Tories, who lost even more by the Queen's demise, generally concurred in the opinion that had Radcliffe (the Tory) hastened to her side as true Tory should have done, instead of leaving her in a position of which young Dr. Mead (the Whig) made him- self the master, good Queen Anne would still have been in life and power. For some weeks the outcry against Rad- cliffe was superlatively violent. In the House of Commons it was moved that the physician, as one of the representa- tives of Buckingham, should be summoned to attend in his place in order that he should be fitly censured by the House for neglecting to attend her late Majesty, and thereby con- tributing to the causes of her death — a proposal all the more painful to the doctor because it proceeded from a baronet whom he had long numbered amongst his closest friends, and with whom, as he pathetically remarked in the ensuing letter, he had "drunk many hundred bottles." "Dear Sir/' the physician wrote from Carshalton on Au- gust 7th, 1714, "I could not have thought so old an ac- quaintance and so good a friend as Sir John always professed himself would have made such a motion against me. God knows, my will to do her Majesty any service has ever got the start of my ability, and I have nothing that gives me greater anxiety and trouble than the death of that great and glorious princess. I must do that justice to the physicians that attended her in her illness, from a sight of the method that was taken from her preservations transmitted to me by DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 87 Dr. Mead, as to declare nothing was omitted for her preser- vation, but the people about her — the plagues of Egypt fall upon them! — put it out of the power of physick to be of any benefit to her. I know the nature of attending crowned heads to their last moments too well to be fond of waiting upon them without being sent for by a proper authority. You have heard of pardons being signed for physicians be- fore a sovereign's demise. However, as ill as I was, I would have gone to the Queen in a horse-litter had either her Majesty, or those in commission next to her, com- manded me so to do. You may tell Sir John as much, and assure him from me that his zeal for her Majesty will not excuse his ill-usage of a friend with whom he has drunk many hundred bottles, and who cannot, even after this breach of the good understanding that was ever preserved between us, but have a very good esteem for him." Whilst it was under consideration whether Radcliffe should be formally censured by the House of Commons, there is evidence (albeit scarcely conclusive evidence) that thirteen passionate fools made a resolve and compact with one another to waylay the physician on his road from Car- shalton to Croydon and avenge the Queen's death with his assassination. One is reluctant to believe that thirteen Eng- lishmen could have been found in the first year of George I. capable of planning so monstrous an outbreak of fanatical malevolence. But if he was not in this matter the victim of a cruel and stupid hoax, it must be taken for true his- tory that the physician was saved from a violent death, and preserved for several more weeks of torture from an over- powering malady by this curious epistle : "Doctor, — Tho' I am no friend of yours, but on the con- trary one that could wish your destruction in a legal way for not preventing the death of our most excellent Queen, whom you had it in your power to save, yet I have such an aversion to taking away men's lives unfairly, as to acquaint you that, if you go to meet the gentleman you have appointed to dine with at the Greyhound, in Croydon, on Thursday next, you will be most certainly murthered. I am one of the persons 88 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL engaged in the conspiracy, with twelve more, who are re- solved to sacrifice you to the ghost of her late Majesty, that cries aloud for blood; therefore, neither stir out of doors that day, nor any other, nor think of exchanging your present abode for your house at Hammersmith, since there and everywhere else we shall be in quest of you. I am touched with remorse, and give you this notice ; but take care of yourself, lest I repent of it, and give proofs of so doing by having it in my power to destroy you, who am your sworn enemy. N. G." No hoax was suspected in this strange epistle by its re- cipient, who, keeping himself a close prisoner at Carshalton, though he was very desirous of paying London another visit, spent the last weeks of his life in lively fear of assassination — an apprehension that, aggravating the irritability and gloom begotten of gout, was doubtless in some degree ac- countable for the fatal course of his bodily disorder. Doleful in its circumstances, the conclusion of this famous physi- cian's career would have been even more dismal had it not been for the sympathetic attentiveness of several of his old medical friends, who, to the neglect of their patients and professional interests, paid him frequent visits. Mead's horses were often seen on the road from London to Carshal- ton during those mournful weeks, and on one of his fre- quent journeys to his failing patron and friend, the young and rapidly rising doctor took with him the beautiful Bible, which had in former times been perused by William IH. In one of the Lansdowne MSS. Kennet relates that on his last visit to his patient at Carshalton, Mead had occasion to ob- serve that the dying man had turned over the leaves of the seasonable present from the first chapter of Genesis to the middle of Exodus, "Whence," observes the writer of the memorandum, "it might be inferred that he had never before read the Scriptures, as I doubt must be inferred of Dr. Linacre, from the account given by Sir John Cheke." It was thus that the great physician passed at a moment of un- merited discredit from a generation that had formerly hon- ored him far above his deserts, "falling a victim," as his DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 89 original biographer assures his smiling readers, "to the in- gratitude of a thankless world and the fury of the gout." It was fortunate for the young physician who, taking pos- session of Radcliffe's house in Bloomsbury Square, suc- ceeded also to his practise^ that the Jacobite coteries were too indignant with the doctor at Carshalton to give much thought to the part taken At the Queen's death-bed by his protege. For a brief hour indeed it was doubtful whether the Tory doctor, who had neglected his sovereign in her dying moments, or the young Whig doctor, who hastened to her chamber with disloyal alacrity, should be sacrificed to social clamor. If the Queen had suffered from the neglect of the older culprit, it was whispered that she had suffered in a still greater degree from the young and self-confident intruder, who disheartened her Tory medical attendants by declaring at his first interview with them that all their talk was idle and all their suggestions bootless, as her Majesty was already sinking. Whispers went about that this mourn- ful opinion was delivered with the eagerness of a man who delighted in the prospect and was set on doing everything to verify his prediction. The whisperers told also how the young Whig doctor's countenance betrayed his chagrin when, on being again blooded, the royal patient recovered for a short while her consciousness and speech. It was the conviction of many persons that even at that late moment her Majesty would have rallied for weeks — and if for weeks, why not for years? — had this young Whig doctor been sil- enced and driven from the palace, so that the Tory doctors, who lost their nerve and wits under his audacious discour- agements, could have had fair play. "This morning," Charles Ford wrote to Swift, "when I went there before nine, they told me she was just expiring. That account continued above three hours, and a report was carried to town that she was actually dead. She was not prayed for even in her own chapel at St. James's ; and what is more infamous ( !) stocks rose three per cent, upon it in the city. Before I came away she had recovered a warmth in her breast and one of her arms, and all the doctors agreed 90 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL she would, in all probability, hold out till to-morrow — except Meade, who pronounced several hours before she could not live ten minutes, and seems uneasy it did not happen so." Certain it is that the Jacobites had no reason to thank Mead, and that the Whigs had cause to speak gratefully of him. Miss Strickland did not go beyond the evidence in saying, "It has always been considered that the prompt boldness of this political physician occasioned the peaceable proclamation of George I." After that event the murmurs against Mead soon died away. Whilst the triumphant Whigs, in gratitude for his action at the trying moment, proclaimed him their physician-in-chief, it was conceded by the most fervid Jacob- ites that if he had served the Queen ill he had served his party well, whereas the treacherous Radcliffe had been aUke false to his Queen and his "friends." Much has been writ- ten of courtiers living on the breath of princes. What more can the faculty require in the way of worldly homage when history says so much of princes living and parties rising to triumph at the will of doctors ? If it would be a great error to think that the famous polit- ical doctors found their patients only within the lines of their respective parties, it would be even a greater mistake to imagine that the same doctors lived more harmoniously with the physicians who agreed with them than with the physi- cians who differed from them in politics. On the contrary, it would appear from some of the most piquant anecdotes of the medical biographers, that concord on questions of State tended to aggravate the jealousies and sharpen the spites of medical competitors. If he railed at Sir Edward Hannes for being the son of a basket-maker, and told Sir Richard Blackmore (the whilom schoolmaster) that he ought to be birched with one of his own rods, Radcliffe hated the Tory physician, James Drake, more cordially than he hated Hannes or Blackmore, or any other doctor of the Whig crew. Having lived on the worst of unfriendly terms with most of his Tory competitors, the Jacobite physician took a young Whig for his special favorite and protege. Still the doctor who befriended Obadiah Walker with noble f ree-handedness, DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 91 was not wanting in generous and delicate munificence to the Tory physician whom he had done his best to ruin, and for whose ruin he was largely accountable. "Let him," he said to a lady, by whose hands he sent fifty guineas to his vanquished and embarrassed rival, "by no means be told whence the money comes. Drake is a gentleman, and has often done his best to hurt me. He could, therefore, by no means brook the receipt of a benefit from a person whom he has treated so ill as he has treated me." Blackmore's Whig- ism only intensified the scorn in which he was held, as a rhymester and blockhead, by Sir Samuel Garth — the wit who, with all his amiability, could not tolerate fools, and the Whig who, with all his political fervor, lived more with Tories than with men of his own party. In these particulars Garth was resembled by Mead, who from early manhood to old age delighted in the society of Tories, and plumed him- self on their friendly care for him. Medical annals comprise few matters more pleasant to the generous reader, or more creditable to human nature, than the story of Mead's conduct towards Freind, when the lat- ter was committed to the Tower on suspicion of being con- cerned in the Atterbury plot. The Jacobite doctor and member of Parliament for Launceston remained in the Tower for several months ; and his imprisonment would have lasted longer had it not been for Mead's repeated and strenuous appeals in his behalf to Sir Robert Walpole, who eventually enlarged the captive on condition that Mead and three other members of the faculty (Drs. Hulse, Levet, and Hale) should be sureties for his good behavior. There was a great gathering of doctors, and a merry dinner in Ormond Street, on the day of Freind's liberation ; and before the guest of the occasion drove westward to his house in Albe- marle Street (in the same carriage with Arbuthnot, who lived in Cork Street, Burlington Gardens), Mead took him aside and gave him the fees taken from his patients during his captivity. At the close of these notes on the political doctors of olden time, something more must be said of Messenger 92 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL Monsey (Lord Chancellor Cranworth's great-grandfather), who was one of the latest well-pronounced examples of his medical species. The ill wind that gave Lord Godolphin (the Lord Treasurer's son) an apoplectic seizure on his road to Newmarket, was a fortunate breeze to Messenger Monsey, whom it wafted from obscurity and indigence in a provin- cial town to celebrity and comparative affluence in the cap- ital. Delighted with the doctor's humor and conversational sprightliness, Lord Godolphin urged him to come to London and pursue fortune in the great world. Acting on the ad- vice, Monsey never regretted having taken it, for though he never rose to the highest honors of his profession or to greatly lucrative employment, he made something more than a sufficient income, and had the gratification of making it out of the wealthy and of living in the best coteries of his party. A sparkling raconteur, he animated the drawing-rooms and coffee-houses with the tongue that would have done him better service could it have quickened the general mirth without wounding the self-love of individuals. Garrick never forgave the caustic talker for crying across a.- riotous table to the Bishop of Sodor and Man, "Garrick going to quit the stage ! That he'll never do so long as he knows a guinea is cross on one side and pile on the other." The tragedian's bitterness against the physician was not mitigated by the story that ran about the town of the way in which the latter repelled Lord Bath's attempt to reconcile the ene- mies who had been friends. "I thank you," said Monsey, "but why will your lordship trouble yourself about the squabbles of a Merry Andrew and a quack doctor?" So long as the actor was vigorous, Monsey, in those days of free speech and broad humor, may not have exceeded the privileges of a chartered humorist in talking pungently of David's greed for gold. But he injured himself with men of good feeling when he seized on Garrick's last illness as an occasion for repeating, in a set of satirical verses, the old reflections on his avarice. In his later years Monsey's temper lost whatever little DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE gi sweetness it ever possessed, and as he grew more morose he yielded to the same ignoble infirmity that had made him speak and write so ruthlessly of Garrick. His dissatisfac- tion with himself and the world was not the less keen because he never survived his conscience, and certainly had some grounds for thinking himself badly treated by his friends. There were times when he grumbled angrily that his friends had more respect for the bon mots he gave them than for the prescriptions for which they would have been charged. Always ready to extol his "Norfolk Doctor/' Sir Robert Walpole forbore to promote his interests apart from the usual payments for medical service. "How happens it," Sir Robert asked one day over his wine, "that no one beats me at billiards or contradicts me except Dr. Monsey?" " 'Tis easy to answer that question," growled Monsey. "Other people get places, and see that I get nothing but a dinner and praise." The Duke of Grafton was even a less beneficent patron and less profitable patient than Sir Robert Walpole. In- stead of paying the doctor promptly for medical service, the duke deferred the payment with a definite promise to obtain for him a certain place that would soon fall vacant, and be at the disposal of the Lord Chamberlain. When the place fell vacant and Monsey reminded the duke of the promise, his grace answered, "I am truly sorry to tell you that in reply to my entreaty the Lxjrd Chamberlain has just been here, explaining that he had already promised the place to Jack ." A few days later, on speaking about the mat- ter to the Lord Chamberlain, the doctor received this as- surance: "Yes, Monsey, the duke did ask me to give the place to a friend of his, and I told him the place was already promised ; but (in strict confidence I may tell you) you were not the person to whom the duke begged me to give the place." Under the annoyance coming to him from this informa- tion, it would have been some consolation to the doctor to draw, in his own peculiar way, one of the duke's soundest 94 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL teeth. This eccentric physician took so keen a delight in drawing teeth by this particular process that, in the absence of a patient with a fee for the service, he would sometimes be his own dentist, and operate on himself from a pure love of art. The process was this : Round the tooth to be drawn the doctor fastened securely a strong piece of catgut, to the other end of which a bullet was attached. A pistol having been charged with this bullet and a full measure of powder, the operation was performed effectually and speedily. The doctor could rarely prevail on his friends to let him remove their teeth in this singular and startlingly simple manner. Once a gentleman, who had agreed to make trial of the nov- elty, and had even allowed the apparatus to be adjusted, turned craven at the last moment. "Stop! Stop!" he exclaimed. "I've changed my mind." "But I haven't changed mine, and you're a coward for changing yours," answered the doctor, pulling the trigger. Even at this distance of time it would be pleasant to dis- cover that the patient of this comedy was his grace of Grafton, and that, to avenge himself for the affair of the place in the Lord Chamberlain's gift, the operator attached the catgut to the wrong tooth. CHAPTER III ENSIGNS AND IMPOSTURES HE eighteenth-century poet erred when he threw off the familiar Unes : Physics of old her entry made Beneath th' immense full-bottom'd shade; While the gilt cane, with solemn pride. To each sagacious nose applied, Seem'd but a necessary prop To bear the weight of wig at top. Like the divines and lawyers, the doctors were debtors for their wigs to the Restoration gallants, who, returning in brave costumes with their sovereign from the exile that had often seen them in garments of seediest and seamiest condition, brought the superb "full-bottom" to the galleries of Whitehall, the cutlet (costelet) to London dinner-tables, and Sucre brule (soon corrupted to "barley-sugar," and in later times made into sucre d'orge) to the knowledge of Eng- lish confectioners. In Tudor England the ordinary cover- ing of a physician's head was a black skull-cap similar in shape and material to the skull-caps worn by Bishops and judges. Wigs were not worn by the medical contemporaries of Dr. Henry Atkins, who sailing with the Earl of Essex for the Spanish coast in 1597, was soon returned to Plymouth for being unable to cure himself of one of the most depress- ing maladies. The famous doctor and insufficient seaman suffered from the motion of the waves all and more than all that the Irish gentleman endured from the physic, which caused him to exclaim to Dr. Babington, "Och ! and it is the emetic ye are ordering me? 'Twon't do, doctor dear. The doctors have tried it with me in Oireland but it niver stayed on my stomach." 96 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL Wearing skull-caps, the pre-Restoration doctors of the greatest light and leading wore muffs in the cold weather, so that their finger-tips should be nicely sensitive of the beatings of feeble pulses, and went their rounds sitting on side-saddles, like women. Instead of springing to and from carriage-step to pavement like doctors of the nineteenth cen- tury, Dr. Argent (repeatedly President of the Physicians in Charles I.'s time) hopped nimbly up and down from the foot-board of his effeminate saddle at the doors of his pa- tients. It was the same with Simeon Foxe (the famous martyrologist's son), who rose to medical eminence in the same period ; and, dying in 1642, was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral near Linacre. Competitors in fashionable prac- tise almost to the last (for they died within a year of one another) Foxe and Argent were the last Presidents of the College, if not the last physicians, to ride about town in womanly fashion. By donning the Restoration wig, the doctors, instead of making themselves conspicuous, only resembled other mod- ish people. The wig became the ensign of the learned pro- fessions through the conservatism of the learned professors, who first rendered themselves slightly conspicuous by wigs of peculiar cut, and eventually made themselves very re- markable by holding to their wigs when the rest of the world had relinquished them. In this matter the profession of which Mr. Briefless is so graceful an ornament, has surpassed the other professions. Still worshiped in our Courts of Law, the wig had passed from the College of Physicians long before the Bishop (Stanley) of Norwich made a flutter in the clerical world by declining to hide his own white hair under artificial tresses. But if the doctors only went with the universal fashion in adopting the Restoration wig, they went with it heartily. What in the way of a full-bottomed court wig can surpass, in ringletted cumbrousness and absurdity, the wig worn by Radcliffe on stateliest occasions, and also in his portrait painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller, before the two neighbors quarreled with one another over their garden wall ? . DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 97 Colonel Dalmahoy can scarcely have been more elegantly equipped with hair taken from other people when it was sung of him : If you would see a noble wig, And in that wig a man look big, To Ledgate Hill repair, my joy. And gaze on Col'nel Dalmahoy. And who, prithee, was Colonel Dalmahoy, that he should be mentioned in these notes about doctors? A colonel of London's trained band, the stately Dalmahoy, living hard by the Apothecaries' Hall, of which he was an equally success- ful and ornamental member, kept a shop on Ludgate Hill, where he . . . sold infusions and lotions, Secretions, and gargles, and pills. Electuaries, powders, and potions. Spermaceti, salts, scammony, squills. Horse-aloes, burnt alum, agaric, Balm, benzoine, blood-stone, and dill ; Castor, camphor, and acid tartaric. With specifics for every ill. But with all his specifics in store. Death on Dalmahoy one day did pop; And although he had doctors a score, Made poor Dalmahoy shut up his shop. Ceasing to ride about town on side-saddles somewhere about the time when the patients of Dr. Argent and Simeon Foxe were compelled to seek advice from other doctors, the London physicians distinguished themselves during the next hundred years by rolling in the stateliest coaches, and driv- ing the best horses to be seen in the London streets. In Queen Anne's time no physician with the slightest preten- sions to eminence could get through his work without a car- riage drawn by four horses. Called to a patient living ten or twelve miles out of town, it was usual for a leader of the medical profession to make the journey with six horses. It followed that aspirants to medical eminence soon began to 98 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL puff themselves into note by the grandeur of their coaches and the excellence of their cattle; that they vied with un- deniably successful doctors in the quality of their horse-flesh, carriages, and liveried servants, provoking thereby from the same doctors of indubitable success many bitter sarcasms and cynical prophecies. When the pert talker at Garraway's declared that "young Dr. Hannes had some of the 'smartest steppers' of the town," Dr. Radcliffe growled audibly over his bottle, "Then they'll sell well when they come to the hammer!" Henceforth the physician was known by his coach, even as the family doctor is known in every London suburb at the present day by his "pill-box," or the butcher by his cart. At the same time the doctor retained the oldest of all his official insignia — the cane that may have come to him from the staff of Hermes, the caduceus of Mercury, or in un- broken succession from the wand of ^sculapius. Wherever he was encountered the man of medicine was recognized by the cane he held in his hand, more often than not held to his nose. Whether he was driving in his carriage, or moving with stately paces through the public ways on foot, or work- ing through the throng of a fashionable salon, the doctor ever had his cane in his hand. In nine cases out of ten the cane was fitted at the top with vinaigrette charged with vir- tuous and finely aromatic essences that were of sovereign efficacy against the poisonous fumes of patients stricken with plague or any other virulent fever. For though he was ever ready to face death on a sufficient consideration in the pursuit of his benevolent calling, the doctor of olden time was not without a prudent care for his own safety. Sometimes the philanthropist's care for himself was more obvious than his care for others. When the benevolent Howard visited Exeter, he found that the medical officer of the county gaol had caused a clause to be inserted in his agreement with the magistrates exempting him from at- tendance on and services to the prisoners during outbreaks of gaol fever. It cannot be doubted this exemplary medical officer, who stipulated that he should not be required to at- DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE $9 tend his miserable patients when they most needed his at- tention, carried a cane with a prodigious vinaigrette charged with pungent scents. It is noteworthy that the physician's cane preserved at the College of Physicians — the cane borne successively by Radcliffe, Mead, Askew, Pitcairn, and Baillie — instead of being fitted with an ostentatious vinaigrette, like the canes held to their noses by the doctors of Hogarth's "Consulta- tion," has a solid cross-bar (znde the engraving of the Wand) with no receptacle for odoriferous and disinfecting materials. By the most sagacious of the several clever gen- tlemen who have tried to account for this remarkable ab- sence of the vinaigrette from the head of the cane carried by five such eminent leaders of the profession, it has been sug- gested that whilst canes with vinaigrettes were carried by doctors of inferior quality, whose avocations required them to enter daily the worst fever-dens and most pestiferous dwellings of the town, the higher physicians, following their calling in the more healthy quarters and politer houses of the metropolis, had no need of the vinaigrette, and therefore made it an affair of dignity and courtesy to carry canes un- armed with disinfectant compositions. It is in favor of this view that Hogarth's caricature of the physicians in consulta- tion contains no portraits of the foremost leaders of the medical profession, and may therefore be regarded as a piece of artistic satire on doctors of the lower grades of profes- sional status and employment. Whilst the physicians had the cane, with or without a vinaigrette, for an ensign, the surgeons showed over their surgeries the painted stick, closely resembling the barber's pole, respecting which a writer in the "British Apollo," No. 3, 1703, put the question : I'd know why he that selleth ale Hangs out a chequered part per pail ; And why a barber at port-hole Puts forth a parti-coloured pole? Nearly a century later (July 17, 1797), in a speech against 100 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL the Surgeons' Incorporation Bill, Lord Thurlow said in the House of Peers, "By a statute still in force the barbers and surgeons were each to use a pole. The barbers were to have theirs blue and white striped, with no other appendage ; but the surgeons', which was the same in other respects, was likewise to have a gallipot and a red bag, to denote the par- ticular nature of their vocation." The Chancellor, who omitted to give the date of the statute to which he referred, was certainly wrong about the proper painting of the sur- geons' pole. Duly tricked, the chirurgical pole ought to have a line of blue paint, a line of red paint, and a line of white paint, winding in serpentine fashion round its length — the blue representing the venus blood, the more brilliant color representing the arterial blood, and the white thread of paint signifying the bandage for use after "blooding" ; the stick itself being a sign that the phlebotomist has at hand a stout staff for his patient to hold, so that by alternately lightening and relaxing his grasp of the staff he may quicken the flow of blood by muscular action of the arm. A thing of great antiquity, the phlebotomist's staff is found in illu- minations of missals penned in the time of Edward I. "Tol- lite barberum" was suggested by Bonnel Thornton as a fit motto for the surgeons in 1745, when the surgeons and bar- bers parted company. The barber was taken from the sur- geons in that year, but the pole so closely resembling the barber's pole remained with the surgeons to a later date. The physician's cane and surgeon's staff were used some- times for medical fustigation during the series of centuries that honored "the stick" (which, according to the Coptic proverb, "came down from heaven") as a sovereign remedy for bodily ailments as well as for moral failings. Antonius Musa cured Octavius Augustus of sciatica by thrashing him soundly. Thomas Campanella prescribed the stick in cases ordinarily treated with colocynth. Galen found it made people fat. Gordonius declared it efficacious in cases of nervous irritability, especially in youthful sufferers. "If the patient is young and disobedient," he wrote, "flog him soundly and often." Certainly on one occasion, if not DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE loi oftener, George III. was flogged for being mad. To this day in primitive districts of Austria mothers cure their chil- dren of whooping-cough by whipping. them. Throughout our feudal period the bleeding-stick and,ljii!,c€;t v^re pijl j:o their especial use at the season fop vernal and , autumnaj "minutions" with a frequency that nowadays' provokfcsd. smile. It was unusual for an abbey to be without a "fleboto- maria," or "bleeding-house," where the people of the estab- lishment could be blooded at the proper times of the year to strains of psalmody. Treatises were written in prose and verse on the art and uses of bleeding. An old tract, well known to collectors of medical curiosities, is divided into the following chapters: i. What is to limit bleeding; 2. Qualities of an able phlebotomist ; 3. Of the choice of in- struments ; 4. Of the band and bolster ; 5 Of porringers ; 6. Circumstances to be considered in the bleeding of a prince. The reader of "The Saleme Schoole" is taught that — Of bleeding many profits grow, and great, The spirits and senses are renewed thereby, Though these mend slowly by the strength of meate, But these with wine restored are by-and-by; By bleeding, to the marrow cometh heate. It maketh cleane your braine, releeves your eie, It mends your appetite, restoreth sleepe. Correcting humours that do waking keepe; All inward parts and senses also clearing, It mends the voice, touch, smell, and hearing. Whilst children were bled, and every one after childhood was bled twice or thrice a year, either because he was ill and wished to get well, or because he was well and wished to get better, there were amateur phlebotomists who bled their friends for amusement. Wanting Lord Randor's vote in an approaching division of the Upper House, and remembering that his lordship was one of these amateurs of the lancet, Lord Chesterfield called upon him, and during the visit took occasion to complain of headache. "You should lose blood then," cried Lord Randor. 102 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL "Then, my dear lord," was the reply, "do be kind enough to bleed me." ., In. another minute a vein of Chesterfield's arm was opened by^ "his brothee in: the peerage. • Alter the -operation the earl had no difficulty in winning the vote °of the- peer, "to whose skill in phlebotomy he had paid so delicate a compliment. "I have been shedding my blood for my country," Chester- field remarked gravely, to the friends whom he informed a few hours later how he got Randor's vote. For bleeding Charles II. with the courageous promptitude that prolonged the king's life for a few days, Sir Edmund King received the Council's order on the Exchequer for a fee of a thousand pounds — an order that was, however, dis- regarded by the Chancellor and Chamberlains of the Ex- chequer. Had Sir Edmund fared as the lords of the Council wished him to fare, he would have received for a single prick of the lancet as much as the most eminent specialist in phlebotomy of George III.'s London used to make in a year by bleeding people at fees ranging between five shillings and a single shilling. From Queen Anne's time to the present century people could be well blooded for six-pence, three-pence, and at times of keen professional competition for nothing, in London, as well as in the provincial towns. Richard Steele, who gave us several droll stories of the quacks of his day, celebrated the phlebotomist who an- nounced that "for the good of the public" he had lowered his charge for bleedings done at certain hours of the day to three-pence. "Whereas," Mr. Clarke advertised in the Stamford Mercury of the 28th of March, 1716, "the ma- jority of apothecaries in Boston have agreed to pull down the price of bleeding to six-pence, let these certify that Mr. Clarke, apothecary, will bleed anybody at his shop gratis.'* The Whitworth Taylors (two brothers famous in their day throughout Yorkshire as practitioners) used to bleed gratis on Sundays, and in May often had a hundred patients of- fering themselves on the same morning for gratuitous vene- DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 103 section in the bleeding-room^ that was fitted with a wooden trough to carry off the blood of the wounded. Whilst expert phlebotomists sometimes received handsome fees for their skill, inexpert ones were sometimes no less generously rewarded for their want of it. A French lady, before she expired from mischance at the hands of a blunder- ing bleeder, bequeathed the maladroit operator a life an- nuity of eight hundred francs, on condition that he never again bled any one. With similar generosity a Polish prin- cess in 1773 employed her last moments in signing the co- dicil to her will by which, together with her forgiveness, she granted an annuity for life of two hundred ducats to the surgeon who, instead of pricking a vein, had divided one of the principal arteries of her arm. "My lord, surely you are not afraid of a bleeding?" said one of these maladroit handlers of the lancet to the French marechal, who flinched under his awkwardness. "I am not afraid of the bleeding," answered the marechal, "but I mis- trust the bleeder." Certainly not more than twenty years since, the writer of this page was lunching with the late Sir Cordy Burrows — liveliest of companions, cleverest of doctors, trustiest of friends — when through his dining-room window were seen signs of commotion on the other side of the Old Steyne of Brighton. It was an accident that had for several minutes been drawing a crowd. Burrows seized his hat, and in an- other minute was one of the rapidly growing crowd that, making way for him, closed about him. Ten minutes later he returned with a droll story about old Bustard, the surgeon on the other side of the steyne, who on Cordy's appearance on the scene was already in possession of the body of a stal- wart workman, who had fallen from a high scaffold raised for building operations. The poor fellow was dead, having broken his neck in the fall, but Bustard had already bound the man's arm with a bleeding-tape, and was standing over him lancet in hand. "What are you after? The man is dead," whispered Burrows. Angry at the interruption, and with eyes protruding from their sockets, as they were wont I04 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL to protrude in his frequent outbreaks of ill-temper, Bustard shook his obstinate head, and replied, in a vicious under- tone, "Thank you for teaching me my business. I know the man is dead ; but the public is getting impatient and ex- pects something to be done." Hence the preparations for bleeding a dead man ! "When in doubt out with your lancet" was the favorite maxim of an extinct school of surgeons who knew very little of their business. To the last this old-fashioned surgeon (of course Bustard was not his real name) used to bleed his old-fashioned pa- tients. An enemy to change. Bustard sincerely believed that doctors ought to be as ignorant as their patients, that it was all right to have a few highly educated doctors to attend upon highly educated patients, such as the aristocracy and the gentry, but altogether wrong to provide humble and un- taught people with doctors of learning and enlightenment. "Pooh !" this interesting man remarked shortly before his death to the present writer ; "this new science is all mighty fine ! Educate young doctors for the upper classes as high as you please, but remember sick people don't all belong to the upper classes. What will become of the poor when all the young doctors have been educated above the requirements of the populace?" What strange training was given even so late as half a century since to boys who were trained, in accordance with Bustard's notions, to be proper doctors for common people ! What marvelous books of medicine and surgery were put into their hands! What astounding compounds in the way of boluses and embrocations were they taught to prepare ! Not seldom the young apprentice was instructed in charlatanry as a department of medical practise! "What good can my medicine do for you if you will be so imprudent as to gorge yourself with broad beans? You are worse ! You had beans for dinner !" exclaimed an apoth- ecary of the old school, as, in company with his apprentice, he entered the parlor of an ancient farrner. Ten minutes later, as they drove away from the farmhouse, the apprentice inquired of his master : DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 105 "How did you know, sir, at a glance, that the old man had dined off beans and bacon?" "My boy," answered the preceptor, "I saw the hulls of the beans as we crossed the yard. Take this lesson to heart. To hold your patients' confidence you must keep your eyes open." Ten days later, sent by himself to call on the same patient and report on his condition, the apprentice found the an- cient farmer much worse — so ill as to be in bed. Assuming his master's air and voice as he entered the chamber of sick- ness, the intelligent youth, with a look of horror in his coun- tenance, exclaimed, "No wonder you are worse! To think of a man in your state being so imprudent as to eat a horse for his dinner! Physic can't cure you if you will do such things!" The worthy pupil of an unworthy master had taken the lesson to heart, and made use of his eyes. New to the country and its manners, the youth (town-born and town-bred) had still to learn it was customary for an ancient farmer to keep his best saddle in his bedroom. Seeing the saddle on its proper tree over the fireplace of the sick-room, it was natural for the youth, unfamiliar with rural usages, to infer that his patient had eaten a horse. That the story may err on the side of extravagance is conceivable ; but it was true to the worst side of the education that was given to the apprentices of provincial apothecaries in the days when every surgeon let blood daily, and every Englishman bore on his arm the marks of the lancet. That those days are not far distant is shown by the very name of our leading medical journal. Established by the enter- prising Mr. Wakley (while a member of Parliament for Finsbury and Coroner for Middlesex), the most audacious of men on any public question, and at the same time the most shy of mortals, that journal was started when the bleeding mania had never been higher, by a gentleman at whose table the present writer has heard many a story told with incom- parable humor. Now that the instrument is reserved for its proper and legitimate uses, who would think of naming a new medical journal after it? In its name. The Lancet — ever studied by the leaders of science, and abreast (as it has io6 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL ever been) with the foremost wave of scientific progress — is an interesting survival of an obsolete medical practise. Whilst every town of England had its strong force of masculine operators with the lancet, the country was scarce- ly less rich in women who could breathe a vein. Every village had a wise woman who could cup, apply leeches, set a broken bone, and render the service needful when new can- didates for human honor or wretchedness are about to wail pitifully for the first time. Coming to them from the feudal centuries, when their sex enjoyed a monopoly of what is nowadays called obstetric practise, the wisdom and respon- sibilities of the healer pertained to the women of England's seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in a degree little im- agined in the present time. To see the close alliance of cook- ery and medicine, of table-fare and kitchen-physic, in olden England, one has only to look into the cookery-books of Elizabethan, Stuart, and early Georgian booksellers, in whose pages prescriptions for fever drinks and tonic draughts are found side by side with recipes for game-pies and mincemeat. The woman who said she could cook was regarded with sus- picion if she said she could not cure. The lady who knew how to furnish forth a bridal banquet was seldom untried and inexpert in the service of Lucina. Instead of intruding on the province of men, the medical women of Georgian time were the victims of masculine intrusiveness, and only sought their livelihood in the ancient ways of their sex. These are matters to be remembered by the student of social history in regarding the careers of Mistress Margaret Kennix and Mistress Woodhouse, the famous doctoresses of the Elizabethan era; of Mrs. Sarah Hastings and Mrs. French, who live for all future ages in the "Philosophical Transactions for 1694" ; and of that phenomenal medical lady, Mrs. Joanna Stephens, who in the middle of the last century received a round £5,000 (£1,356 3s. from aristocratic subscribers, and the remaining £3,643 17s. by Parliamentary grant), for a public revelation of the process by which she made the medicines that had saved so many valuable lives. DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 107 Till it can be shown that calcined snails, powdered snail- shells, egg-shells, and Alicant soap are more efficacious than iodine and quinine against disease, the present writer will continue to think meanly of Mistress Joanna's medicines; but it is impossible not admire the lady's audacity in de- manding i5,ooo for her recipes^ and her firmness in standing out for the last farthing of the price she put upon them. Mistress Joanna Stephens was still the darling of duch- esses and the peculiar pet of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chancellor, when Mistress Sarah Mapp, alias "the Epsom bone-setter," caught the ear and conscience of the town, so far as to be proclaimed a bone-setter of more than human cunning. The daughter of a Wiltshire bone- setter, the wife of a violent person who thrashed her sev- eral times during the two weeks of their cohabitation. Mis- tress Mapp cannot have been greatly indebted for her success to her personal charms, if art has done her no injustice. In other respects she was a lady to be admired at a distance rather than worshiped in a small drawing-room — to be studied through glasses of history rather than in the ways of domestic intimacy. She certainly had some disagree- able failings. Had she been a duchess she could not have sworn louder oaths, and she drank more Geneva than Dr. Ward Richardson would think good for any of his patients. Still, she made a brave show when she drove (as she did once a week) in a chariot drawn by four horses, and preceded by outriders in splendid liveries, from Epsom, where she had her home, to the Grecian Coffee House, where she received her London patients, some of whom were people of the highest fashion and rank. It was, of course, vastly droll to see the gentle creature at the playhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields, seated between Spot Ward and Chevalier Taylor; and, better still, to see her on being mobbed by the crowd, who mistook her for a certain German countess, put her head out of her coach window, as she screamed (somewhat as Nell Gwynne screamed on a similar occasion) : "Don't io8 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL you know me ? I am not the countess, but Sally Mapp, the bone-setter." No doubt the poet was regardless of his fee, and thoughtful only of the lady's merit, when he wrote — Dare you vas see the venders of the varld which make the hair stand on tiptoe. Dare you vas see mine tumb and mine findgar; fire from mine findgar and feaders on mine tumb. Dare you vas see de gun fire viddout ball or powder. O venders ! venders ! vonder- ful venders ! You surgeons of London, who puzzle your pates, To ride in your coaches, and purchase estates. Give over for shame, for pride has a fall, And the doctress of Epsom has outdone you all, Derry down, with other verses no less musical. Still, when all has been conceded that ought to be conceded to her credit, it remains that Mistress Mapp was a lady quite as clever at breaking bones as she was at setting them. If she was the most impudent quack of her sex she was not the most shameless quack of her time. To excel in im- pudence and charlatanry it is not necessary to be a woman. If they could only be raised from the grave and made into good soldiers, the male quacks of old England would be a valuable addition to our standing army. If they would only fight as smartly and as resolutely as they lied in former times, no German regiment could stand before them. Even the captains of the knavish throng would fill a long list. One is reluctant to speak ill of Atwell (the parson of St. Tue, celebrated in Fuller's "Worthies"), who, like all the most successful quacks in medicine, succeeded by leaving nature to take her own course ; or the pious Valentine Great- rakes, who at least began his healing career like an honest gentlemen, and doubtless cured as many people of the king's evil by stroking them as ever an English king with a crown on his head cured by virtue of royal touch. Then comes Thomas Saffold, of Charles 11. 's London, one of the first London quacks to advertise his wares by handbills, given to passers in the public streets. In the whole army of fraudu- lent pretenders no two saucier knaves could be found than DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 109 the taylor Reade (converted by royal accolade into Sir Will- iam Reade), and the tinker Roger Grant, whom Queen Anne constituted her "sworn oculists," to the displeasure of the rhymester who threw off the verses : Her Majesty sure was in a surprise, Or else was very short-sighted; When a tinker was sworn to look after her eyes. And the mountebank Reade was knighted. At no long space they were followed by Dr. John Han- cock, rector of St. Margaret's, Lothbury, who wrote up the water-cure in George L's time. In the next reign did not "Spot" Ward (so styled from the mole on his cheek) make a fortune by his pills, and drive (by royal permission) his splendid coach and big horses daily through St. James's Park? Who has not heard of the tar water mania? The two quack oculists (Chevalier Taylor and his son, John Taylor, junior) were only less offensive than tinker Grant and Sir William Reade by being considerably less success- ful. Like Greatrakes, the Loutherbourgs (man and wife) cured people by manual touch, unaided by medicine, and assigned their mysterious power to the especial favor of the Giver of all gifts; but whilst it is questionable whether Greatrakes ever stroked the sick for profit, it is certain that, while professing to take no reward, the Loutherbourgs filled their pockets from the purses of those who believed in them. Another charlatan to live on the lips, whilst dipping hand into the pocket of fashionable London (temp. George IIL), was Dr. Myersbach. Contemporary with Myersbach was Dr. Katterfelto, celebrated in Cowper's "Task" by the lines, And Katterfelto, with his hair on end, At his own wonders, wondering for his bread. Katterfelto was remarkable for entertaining the people who bought his nostrums, and also the people who made no trial of his medicines, with lectures on electricity, the air- pump, and the solar microscope. The experiments at these scientific addresses may have been diverting, but the pro- fessor's oratory cannot have contributed much to the tran- no DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL sient popularity of his entertainments^ if he was faithfully reported in the inscription of the old print : "Dare you vas see the venders of the varld, which make de hair stand on tiptoe. Dare you vas see mine tumb and mine findgar ; fire from mine findgar and feaders on mine tumb. Dare you vas see de gun fire viddout ball or powder. O venders ! vonders ! vonderful vonders!" In his heyday (no long day) the tall, thin impostor, wearing a black gown and square cap, used to move about the country in a chariot drawn by six horses and surrounded by outriders in brilliant liveries. But on falling in public favor he appeared with only two mean horses harnessed to his coach, whilst his retinue of footmen had dwindled to two black boys in green coats with red collars. Having fallen thus low, Katterfelto's career was ended by the Mayor of Shrewsbury, who sent him to the House of Correction for the ordinary punishment of a rogue and vagabond. Ere long Katterfelto was replaced by impostors of some- what higher education and very much better style. For a while Perkins (the American cheat) made good running with his metallic tractors, till Dr. Haygarth of Bath, de- stroyed the adventurer's credit. With his Temple of Health (first in the Adelphi and afterwards in Pall Mall), with Emma Harte (Lady Hamilton) figuring as Goddess of Health in the "Sanctum Sanctorum," whilst patients took earth-baths in the rear part of the premises, Dr. Graham fleeced the public for a long term of years before he lost or spontaneously surrendered his hold of fashion's foolish throng. At no great distance of time he was succeeded by the elegant, graceful, well-mannered St. John Long, whose house in Harley street was no less attractive to women of high birth and rank and brightest fashion after, than it had been before, his trial for the manslaughter of Miss Cashin. When consumption sent him to a premature grave in Ken- sal Green Cemetery, this finest gentleman of the medical im- postors was still the idol of his fair dupes. What are the limits of charlatanry? They are co-extensive with those of human credulity. CHAPTER IV GOOD CHEER AND SPARE DIET N the days when our forefathers drank sack and ale with their rich breakfasts, dined heavily at midday, supped copiously at 6 P. M., and in times of festivity indulged in "rear-suppers" towards midnight, doctors found no small part of their employment in fitting patients, who had feasted themselves ill, for a re- moval of the pleasures of the table. Of all the jolly fellows who followed medicine as a profession^ and gluttony as a fine art, in Charles II.'s London, none were in greater re- quest with epicures and gourmands than Dr. Whitaker, who wrote "The Tree of Humane Life, or the Bloud of the Grape," to prove "the possibilitie of maintaining humane life from infancy to extreme old age without any sicknesse, by the use of wine" (a treatise properly held in low esteem by my friend Dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson) ; and John Archer, who, whilst serving the Merry Monarch as one of his physicians in ordinary, condescended to receive ordinary patients at his chambers near the Mews (near Charing Cross), at his house in Knightsbridge, "where there was good air for the cure of consumption, melancholy, and other infirmities," and at the open shop in Winchester Street (City), hard by the Gresham College and next door to the Fleece Tavern, where, together with divers nostrums for put- ting death at a distance, he sold good tobacco at one shilling and super-excellent tobacco at two shillings an ounce. The soothing pipe was the rich man's luxury rather than the poor man's solace when the fragrant weed cost from five to ten shillings an ounce in Victorian money. A gentleman of mechanical genius. Dr. Archer sold also at his Winchester Street shop the hot steam bath, and the oven that would 113 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL "with a small faggot bake a good quantity of anything," which owed their existence to his ingenuity. He was, more- over, the first mechanician to put on the streets of London a coach capable of holding four or five persons, that could be drawn easily by a single horse. It was natural for so in- ventive a physician to bethink himself that the human stom- ach might be more effectually swept out with a brush than with pills of colocynth and drinks compounded of senna- tea and Epsom salts. Acting on this notion, he produced his famous stomach-brush, bearing a close resemblance to the inplement still in use for cleaning the inside of bottles and other narrow-necked vessels. Forced down the patient's gullet, and worked by a vigorous operator, this charming arrangement for putting old-fashioned emetics out of fashion was fruitful of sensations that may be left to the reader's imagination — sensations that prevented the brush from com- ing into general favor with squeamish invalids. On finding his patients universally reluctant to be brushed out a second time, Dr. Archer had reason to reflect warmly on their want of fortitude, and to complain of the world for not giving his admirable invention a fair trial. John Archer was not the only doctor of his period to prescribe tobacco as a medicine for weakness of memory and eyesight, a sovereign remedy for rheum and ague, and a sure defense against the plague. Old Butler, whose medi- cated ale was sold under his name long after his death at the Butler's Head, in Mason's Alley, Basinghall Street, seldom felt a sick man's pulse without bidding him put a pipe in his mouth ; and Dr. Everard celebrated the medical and chirurgi- cal efficacy of the potent plant in his "Panacea, or the Uni- versal Medicine ; being a Discovery of the Wonderful Vir- tues of Tobacco taken in a Pipe." Whilst tobacco was thus honored by the faculty, it was averred that during the Great Plague of London no tobacconist's house was visited by the pestilence. Hence the practise of making children smoke in sickly seasons — a practise that formerly constrained many a little fellow at Eton to choose a whipping on being told he must suffer from the stinging rod if he would not sicken DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 113 from the nauseating pipe. In these later generations tobacco has found little favor with the faculty, and of all the doc- tors to denounce a habit that has survived so many efforts for its suppression, none was more vehement or more loudly applauded by the anti-tobacconists than Samuel Solly, the whilom surgeon of St. Thomas's Hospital, who saw death in the pipe no less distinctly than George Cruikshank dis- covered it in the bottle. Seeing death thus clearly in tobacco, Mr. Solly saw death in all smokers of it. The tobacco controversy, by which the clever surgeon is chiefly remembered at the present time, was at its height some five-and-twenty years, when a London merchant en- tered Henry Jeaffreson's consulting-room in a state of lively excitement and begged the physician to examine him and be frank with him, to lose no time in examining him and telling him the worst. The applicant entreated that nothing should be withheld from him. He was not afraid to die ; not a bit of it ; but he had affairs to arrange, settle, wind up, and it was of high importance he should know within a little how much time he might count upon for the winding-up of his affairs. The examination must be m^de at once; not a moment must be lost. "What's all this about?" inquired the physician of Bar- tholomew's Hospital, as one of his peculiar smiles — a smile of mingled sympathy and humor — played over his face, whilst he recognized a former patient in his visitor. "But I see ; you have been rejected by a life office, and you want me to tell you what is the matter." "Precisely! My life has been rejected by the Arm-in- Arm, and they won't say why they have rejected me." After making a long and careful examination of the con- demned man, the physician observed, quietly, "You need not hurry in winding up your affairs. Take your time ; there is really no need for haste." "How many years have I to live?" "That's more than I can say." "What's the matter with me?" "Nothing. You're as sound as a bell." 114 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL "But they rejected me at the Arm-in- Arm," returned the equally relieved and perplexed applicant, repeating the name of a life insurance office that of course was not named the Arm-in-Arm. "You're an old friend, and I can trust you not to go about telling every one what I say to you. Solly examined you at the Arm-in-Arm?" "Yes, Mr. Solly — good man." "A very good man ; and he asked you if you smoked ?" "Yes. And I told him, 'Three or four cigars a day.' " "That answer was enough to make Solly discover heart- disease or anything else in you. Pay no attention to his verdict. Trust to my assurance — you're as sound as a bell." "You're sure you are not saying this to cheer me up and put me at my ease ?" "How much do you know of Solly?" "I never saw him until he examined me, and I have never seen him since." "It would be a great comfort to you to hear Solly declare you a good life? If he told you so, nothing would remain of the uneasiness he has occasioned you ?" "It would indeed relieve me vastly. But it is not to be supposed he will recall his opinion." "If he could be induced to examine you, and report on you, not knowing that you smoked, would it be enough for you if, under that misconception, he declared you all right?" "Quite." "Well, I think that might be managed. Solly is medical referee for another office — the United Economists. Your name is not a remarkable name ; Smith is not a remarkable name ; and Solly does not recollect faces. If you went be- fore him at the United Economists' office for another ex- amination, he would not recognize you." The hint was taken. Smith was re-examined by the same clever, able, adroit surgeon, and he left the surgeon's pres- ence with an assurance that he was in perfect health, and had a heart not unlikely to go on beating till he was eighty years of age. Smith's mind was at ease, though it must be DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 115 admitted he was guilty of something very near a false as- sertion when, in reply to the examiner's inquiry, "Do you smoke?" he ejaculated, in a tone of abhorrence and with a look of ineffable disgust, "Bah ! Disgusting habit ! How can you ask me such a question?" To return from the smoke-room to the dining-room, for whose chief article of furniture society is indebted to a doc- tor less famous for the excellence of his ragouts than the weakness of his mutton-broth. Not that Nurse Gibbons, Radcliffe's well-hated rival, lived on the slops and light messes he prescribed for his patients when they were in his power. On the contrary, a deep drinker and insatiable gourmand, the grossness of whose debaucheries offended the epicurean Garth, Dr. Gibbons put substantial fare on the first mahogany dining-table ever seen in London — the table made out of the "new wood" which his brother, the West Indian captain, had brought to England as ballast for his vessel. Whether Mead took Radcliffe's oak table together with his house is a question about which social history is silent, but readers need not to be told that the great Whig physician maintained the hospitable traditions of his profession. In the far-away time, when Bloomsbury was fashionable and gentle- women of the highest quality received their friends in Queen's Square, no house in Great Ormond Street had a better reputation than Mead's for the grandeur of its dinners and the brilliance of its entertainments. At a brief interval Mead was followed by John Coakley Lettsom, the West In- dian Quaker, who, earning ii2,ooo a year in the fulness of his long-sustained success, displayed at the same time the virtues of a Friend and the tastes of a man of society. The originator of the Finsbury Dispensary, the Surrey Dis- pensary, and the Margate Sea-Bathing Infirmary, Lettsom also found time, amidst the exactions and distractions of his professional avocations, to take an active part in the estab- lishment of the Philanthropical Society for the Reformation of the Criminal Poor, the Society for the Relief of Impris- oned Debtors, the Asylum for the Indigent Deaf and Dumb, n6 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL the Institution for the Rehef and Employment of the Indi- gent BHnd, and the Royal Humane Society. The author of numerous books, he was a frequent contributor to the Getp- tleman's Magazine, under the signature of Mottles, an ana- gram of his own name. And yet with so singular a diver- sity of employments and interests the laughter-loving Quaker could devote the Saturday of every week to the re- ception of his friends. How he entertained them in the sum- mer we know from Boswell's lines : Yet are we gay in every way, Not minding where the joke lie; On Saturday at bowls we play At Camberwell with Coakley. Methinks you laugh to hear but half The name of Dr. Lettsom ; For him of good — talk, liquors, food — His guests will always get some. And guests has he, in ev'ry degree, Of decent estimation ; His liberal mind holds all mankind As an extended nation. Boswell's rhyme on the physician's name reminds one of the doctor's humorous quartet on his own way of dealing with patients — When patients sick to me apply I physics, bleeds, and sweats 'em, Then — if they choose to die, What's that to me — I lets 'em — L Lettsom. In concern for the interests of gastronomy no living leader of the medical profession surpasses Sir Henry Thompson, the famous surgeon who would have been a Royal Academi- cian thirty years since had he followed the example of his grandfather (Medley, the portrait-painter) in making the fine arts his profession instead of his amusement ; and would have figured in the first rank of men of letters, had not the eclat of a brilliant amateur satisfied his ambition for literary distinction. Moving in the sunshine of society, and living with all sorts and conditions of clever and honorable men who are drawn to him by endowments that would have made DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 117 him a social power even if they had not been attended with social prosperity, the author of "Food and Feeding" has for years entertained his friends of the sterner sex at "dinners of eight," that have long had a reputation which enables the present writer to refer to them without impropriety. Served at eight o'clock to the moment, the Wimpole Street dinners are arranged for eight "convives," with due regard for the entertainer's favorite festal number. Headed by a musical octave, the vienu promises eight dishes ; and eight bottles of wine perish with each repast. Not many months have passed since the Prince of Wales was at one of these dinners of eight and returned to Marlborough House in a humor to report that the Wimpole Street "Octaves" had been spoken of none too honorably. It is on record that when Queen Anne's Dr. Radcliffe had the honor of entertaining Prince Eugene of Savoy at a table spread with "barons of beef, jiggets of mutton, legs of pork, and other ponderous masses of butcher's stuff," the prince was good enough to declare himself "highly delighted with the food and liquors." If on leaving 35 Wimpole Street, the Prince of Wales omitted to say or hint as much, it may be assumed (by a writer who has been one of Sir Henry's "Octavians" from the first in- stitution of the celebrated dinners) that his Royal Highness felt it. Promoting the good fellowship that proceeds from good cheer by their cooks and kitchens and well-furnished cellars, the leaders of the medical profession have also furthered the interests of gastronomy with their pens. Indeed the role of memorable medical Amphitryons is scarcely longer or more remarkable than the role of medical contributors to the literature of feeding. "The Forme of Cury," the earliest of all our historic and authoritative cookery-books, pro- ceeded from a committee of Richard II.'s doctors. Sir Theodore Mayerne, who died of a too perfect supper at a Strand Hotel, left posterity a goodly collection of "Ex- cellent and Well-Approved Receipts in Cookery." The most famous of all Sir John Hill's many publications is "The Art of Cookery," which he produced under the nom de plume Ii8 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL of Mrs. Glasse — the useful compilation which has every housekeeper's good word and no one's ridicule, till some blockhead, after misreading the compiler's seasonable direc- tion, "First case your hare" {i. e., "First skin your hare"), declared Mrs. Glasse a foolish body for writing "First catch your hare," as though it were in the power of mortal cook to roast a hare before it had been caught. Dr. Martin Lister (one of Queen Anne's physicians), who loved good cheer wisely and none too well, even as Dr. Martin Luther loved "women, wine, and song," edited Apicius Cselius's "Viands and Condiments." Dr. Kitchener gave mankind the "Cook's Oracle." Dr. Lankester (whilom of the Royal Society and Coroner of Middlesex) published his lectures on the Chemistry of Food. To Sir Henry Thompson we owe a treatise on Wholesome and Delicate Fare (the reprinted ar- ticles on "Food and Feeding," from The Nineteenth Cetp- tury), which, while showing the rich how to enjoy the lux- uries of a costly table, does good service to the poor by showing at how small a charge one may procure all the nourishment that is needful for the body's perfect suste- nance. Let it not, however, be imagined that Sir Henry Thomp- son and Dr. Richardson were the first of their calling to dis- cover in excess the greatest foe to physical vigor and mental ease. The experience of many healers was condensed by the author of "The Salerne Schoole" into the familiar couplet : Use three physicians still — first Doctor Quiet, Next Doctor Merriman and Doctor Diet. Lewis du Moulin may have held quietude and mirth in dis- esteem for he was a bitter disputant and an austere Cal- vinist ; but he was alive to the fact ever being forced on the physician's notice that whilst temperance is favorable to health in all men, any departure from moderation in eating and drinking is, in various degrees, hurtful to most men. A physician of three Universities (Leyden, Cambridge, and Oxford, and Camden Professor of History at the last-> DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE ng named University during the Commonwealth), Ehi Moulin was no sooner turned out of his professorship by the re- storers than he migrated to Westminster, and, resuming medical practise, found abundant employment in his proper vocation, till he remarked in his dying illness to the friends about his bed, that "he left behind him two great physicians — Regimen and River Water," a water, by the way, of which he would perhaps have thought less favorably had the Thames been no purer in the seventeenth century than it is at the present time. It is a question whether this laudator of river water was related to the surgeon of the same name (alias Moulins, alias Molins), who enjoyed John Evelyn's friendship, and had the honor of trepanning Prince Rupert towards the close of the illness which gave the courtiers of Whitehall occasion for marveling how the hero, so fearless of death in the bat- tlefield, was so inordinately afraid of dying in his lodgings at Whitehall. Great was the stir in the galleries and on the staircase of the palace when the prince was known to be undergoing the operation. "We are full of wishes for the good success" (i. e., of the operation), says Pepys, adding in the same sentence, with piquant frankness, "though I dare say but few do really concern ourselves for him in our hearts." After groaning for many a year under the burden and ignominy of a body so fat that he is said to have weighed thirty-two stone, Dr. Cheyne, the famous Bath physician, discovered the pleasures of eating and drinking were not worth the price he was required to pay for them. The re- sult of this discovery was that he bade beef-steaks a long farewell, and, adopting a milk-and-vegetable diet, reduced himself to eleven stone, to the great improvement of his health and appearance. Having at the age of forty dis- covered what was good for himself, the doctor — who lacked discretion, though no one ever accused him of wanting wit — conceived that every one ought to follow his example. For a while Bath was divided into two parties — the milk-drinkers and the wine-drinkers — who would have had nothing in 120 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL common had not the members of both factions loved whist, deHghted in intrigue, and thought it their duty to "drink the waters." In the heat of the ensuing controversy about the new diet of milk and green vegetables, Dr. Wynter (the favorite physician of the wine-drinkers, and possibly more capable in medicine than poetry) declared his disdain for the regimen and its originator in these verses: Tell me from whom, fat-headed Scot, Thou didst thy system learn; From Hippocrate thou hast it not, Nor Celsus, nor Pitcairn. Suppose we own that milk is good, And say the same of grass ; The one for babes is only food. The other for an ass. Doctor, our new prescription try (A friend's advice forgive), Eat grass, reduce thyself, and die, Thy patients then may live. Declaring himself the sufficient authority for his new method, Cheyne answered: My system, doctor, is my own. No tutor I pretend ; My blunders hurt myself alone. But yours your dearest friend. Were you to milk and straw confined, Thrice happy might you be; Perhaps you might regain your mind, And from your wit be free. I can't your kind prescriptions try. But heartily forgive ; 'Tis natural you should wish me die, That you yourself may live. Cheyne was happier in his manner of dealing with an af- front put upon him by Beau Nash, who, on being asked whether he had followed a prescription given him by the doctor on the previous day, replied saucily, "If I had I should have broken my neck, for I threw it out of the window." A few days later (before he turned milk-drinker) Cheyne was sitting over a bottle with some learned friends, and stirring them to unphilosophic extravagances of laugh- DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 121 ter with his droll stories^ when he suddenly pulled a long face, and remarked, after glancing to a distant spot whence the Beau could be seen approaching, "Hush! we must be grave now ; here's a fool coming our way." To Cheyne a word of thanks is due for a careful and curious account of Colonel Townshend's singular faculty of feigning death. In the presence of Cheyne, another physi- cian (Dr. Baynard), and an apothecary named Skrine, who had been invited to witness the exhibition, the colonel laid himself on his back and simulated death as he had often simulated it in former times. In a few seconds no pulse was perceptible in the exhibitor's wrist; a few seconds later and his heart had ceased to beat. By holding a mirror be- fore the colonel's lips the medical trio satisfied themselves that he was not breathing. For half an hour the colonel lay in this state, unconscious, breathless, pallid, pulseless, in every particular of appearance as dead as the proverbial door-nail ; when, to the relief of the spectators, who were be- ginning to fear the performance had been carried too far, a slight movement of the body caused them to resume their duties of observation, Cheyne putting his forefinger to the patient's wrists, and Dr. Baynard laying his right palm over the region of the exhibitor's heart. A few seconds more and the colonel was alive again. What followed his return to consciousness is perhaps the strangest part of the whole story. Having dismissed his medical inspectors. Colonel Townshend sent for his attorney, made his will, and died really, within six hours of his last imitation of death. Why did he die? Had he, as the doctors say, overdone it? Apropos of this doctor named Cheyne, and this story of a heart that ceased to beat during its owner's life, reference may be made to Sir Thomas Cheyne's heart, that is said in "Baker's Chronicle" to have continued to beat for more than three quarters of an hour after his death. Sir Thomas Cheyne was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports at the time of his demise, in the first year of Elizabeth's reign. The reporter of so curious a fact omits to state how the watchers 122 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL about the Lord Warden's bed knew he was dead when to their knowledge his heart was still beating. Paying due attention to the diet of his patients, Sir Rich- ard Jebb, by no means the courtliest of court physicians, was apt to be irritable when they pestered him with too many questions touching what they should eat, drink, and avoid. "Pray, Sir Richard, may I eat a muffin?" asked a lady who had suffered from violent indigestion on the previous Tuesday. "By all means, madam," answered the physician ; "have a muffin if you wish for one. It is as good a thing as you can take." "But, dear Sir Richard, a few days since you said a muffin was the very worst thing for me." "Pshaw ! pshaw ! madam, that was last Tuesday. This isn't Tuesday is it ?" tartly returned the doctor, in a manner which, to listeners unacquainted with the circumstances of the case, seemed to imply that muffins meant sudden death on Tuesdays, and were faultless feeding on every other day of the week. To another fashionable lady, who objected to the dinner the doctor was ordering for her, Sir Richard responded with still greater severity. "Boiled mutton and turnips?" cried the lady. "You for- get, Sir Richard, that I can't bear boiled turnips !" "Then, madam," returned the doctor, in a tone of stern- est reprobation, as though he were charging her with some serious immorality, "you must have an extremely vitiated palate." Lest she should provoke a charge of morbid appetite the poor lady fell back upon golden silence, and forbore to name the vegetable she would prefer to boiled turnips. To an old gentleman, a malade imagincdre, with the diges- tion of an ostrich and the fancifulness of half a hundred ladies of quality, Jebb exclaimed ferociously, "What may you eat? Don't eat the poker, or the shovel, or the tongs, for even you will find them hard of digestion. Don't eat the bellows, for they are apt to make wind. But eat anything DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 123 else you please." In this style the physician had been allow- ing his tongue to play freely, when, in submission to a look of anger on the face of a lordly patient, he added apologetic- ally, "Don't be offended at my way. It's only my way." "If that's only your way," replied the invalid, pointing to the door, "oblige me by making that your way." The apology was insufficient, but it had the merit of truthfulness. It was the physician's way to say whatever he pleased. Un- like Dr. Johnson, who could not presume to bandy words with his sovereign. Sir Richard Jebb talked as lightly to George III. as to any other of his patients. When the king lamented the restless spirit of his physician's cousin (Dr. John Jebb, the dissenting minister), Sir Richard answered, "And please you, sire, if my brother were in heaven he would be a reformer." The caricature of Abernethy with which Theodore Hook enlivened the rather torpid pages of the "Parish Clerk" con- tains a passage which has caused the people to imagine the famous surgeon allowed his patients any license in eating and drinking that stopped short of drunkenness and egregi- ous gluttony. "Eat the best of everything you fancy," he is made to say in a story, "only don't cram; drink as much of the best wine you can get as will exhilarate you without making you drunk." Habitually temperate in his habits, though by no means averse to the pleasures of the table in seasons of recreation, the surgeon of liberal culture and pur- suits (whose tone and temper have been strangely misrepre- sented by the anecdotical gossip-mongers) did perhaps more than any doctor of his period to teach the world that whilst temperance was health's best friend, indolence was one of its worst enemies. The surgeon who told the indolent bon- vivant to "live on six-pence a day and earn it" gave a good opinion in the fewest possible words, and fairly earned the guinea which no doubt was paid reluctantly for advice so ex- cellent and at the same time so unacceptable. A double fee was too small a payment for his instructions to the alder- man's footman, who was ordered to put in a bowl a fair por- tion of every dish of which his master partook at a civic ii4 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL feast, and after the banquet to put the bowl with all its mis- cellaneous contents of turtle, turbot, butcher's meat, poultry, game, salad, sweet-messes, cheese, fruits, ale, wine, and cakes, immediately under the eyes of the gentleman who was ill of nothing but habitual over-feeding. Ever ready to listen to the talk of his patients so long as it was to the purpose and promised to help him in minister- ing to them, Abernethy was quick to check them in lo- quacity that, wasting his time, could be fruitful of no ad- vantage to them. Giving them good advice in the fewest possible words, he liked them to be no less concise in stat- ing the particulars of their ailments. One of the well-at- tested stories about the great surgeon closes with the com- pliment he paid a gentlewoman who, coming to him on three several occasions, showed on each visit a nice and humorous consideration for his dislike of vain talkativeness. Holding out her wounded finger as she entered the sur- geon's consulting-room, the lady allowed him to open the following conversation : Abernethy. — Cut ? Lady. — Bite. A bernethy. — Dog ? Lady. — Parrot. Abernethy. — Go home and poultice it. The second visit was fruitful of three utterances over the extended finger. Abernethy. — Better ? Lady. — Worse. Abernethy. — Go home and poultice it again. At the third interview the finger, extended for the third time, occasioned these words: Abernethy. — Better ? Lady.— Well. Abernethy (with enthusiasm, whilst his twinkling eyes showed his proper appreciation of the lady's fine humor) . — Ton my honor, madam, you are the most sensible woman I ever met. Good-bye! In deciding whether an anecdote about Abernethy is DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 125 genuine or spurious, readers should remember that the great surgeon, besides being a humorist, was a man of good taste, high breeding, and tenderest humanity. On perusing a story which exhibits him as greatly deficient in any one of these qualities, readers may safely assume he had nothing more to do with the incidents of the narrative than with the com- position of the detestable carraway-seed biscuit that is still sold at confectioners' shops under his name. CHAPTER V WRATH, GRANDEUR, MARRIAGE, AND MYSTERY WARD'S "Lives of the Gresham Professors" contains a picture of a gentleman in the costume of the eadier half of the eighteenth century, kneeling within the Broad Street gateway of the Gresham College as he surrenders his sword to another gentleman who has just worsted him in a duel. The gentleman on his knee is Professor Woodword, the gentleman on his feet is Dr. Mead, and the scene represents the conclusion of the passage of arms in which the successful physician chastised the satirical professor for certain disdainful and insolent words in his "State of Physic and Diseases." If Professor Woodword knelt thus submissively — which is questionable — he preserved the presence of mind to surrender his weapon with a witty retort to Mead's ungenerous demand. "Beg for your life !" cried the victor. "I will when Pm your patient," answered the professor, coming better out of the conflict of words than out of the combat with swords. Unless personal history has exaggerated the kindliness of the man, whose lineaments are thus preserved to us amongst the marbles of Westminster Abbey, he must have admired the spirit of his worsted adversary, and secretly congratu- lated himself on opening nothing more serious than a vein of sprightly humor in an affair that closed without a scratch of the skin to either combatant. The medical duels of the eighteenth century were not al- ways or often so innocent as Mead's bloodless encounter with the Gresham professor, and few of them were more tragic and scandalous than the combat that sent Dr. Wil- liams and Dr. Bennet to another world. To discover what DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 127 these doctors quarrelled about in the first instance one would have to examine the pamphlets with which the combatants traduced one another, before Dr. Bennet, whipped to fury by his enemy's superior literary adroitness, challenged him to mortal conflict — a challenge that was scornfully declined by Dr. Williams, who had succeeded too well with the pen to be desirous of changing it for a less familiar weapon. Indignant at the refusal, Dr. Bennet hastened to his ad- versary's house to taunt him with his cowardice, when he was repelled from the doorstep by a charge of swan-shot, sent into his breast from the pistol of Dr. Williams, who had condescended to act as his own hall porter. Severely wounded, Dr. Bennet was retiring across the street towards a friend's house, when Dr. Williams rushed after him, fired another pistol at him, and then, drawing sword, ran him through the body. Turning on his too impetuous pursuer. Dr. Bennet contrived to draw his rapier and slay his as- sailant. The whole affair was over in three minutes. Wil- liams dying in the street and Bennet surviving him by no more than four hours. What a ghastly ending to a squabble about some question of medical treatment of etiquette ! A more orderly but not less ferocious duel occurred in the following century (1830) near Philadelphia, when Dr. Smith and Dr. Jeffries demonstrated their mutual brotherly love by killing one another with pistols. No mischief was done by the first exchange of shots. At the second exchange Dr. Smith's right arm was broken — an incident that caused him to declare he could handle his weapon fairly with his left hand^ and would rather die on the field than leave it wounded. Thus fighting at a disadvantage, Dr. Smith, in the third exchange of compliments, lodged his ball in one of his adversary's thighs. It was now Dr. Jeffries's turn to demand another opportunity for satisfaction. Again, placed at a distance of six feet from one another, the insane prin- cipals exchanged shots for the fourth time, and in doing so obtained the desired satisfaction, Smith getting a bullet in his heart, and Jeffries dying a few hours later from the ball put into his breast. On hearing that his enemy was ia8 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL dead, Dr. Jeffries remarked thankfully, "Then I die con- tented," a state of feeling, however, that did not prevent him from declaring the highest respect for the late Dr. Smith's scientific attainments and generous nature. Schoolfellows in boyhood, these gentlemen had been intimate friends for fifteen years before they came to hate one another with the hatred possible only to medical neighbors and rivals. Three years had passed over the graves of Drs. Smith and Jef- fries, when life on the western circuit of England was stirred by the cause celebre arising out of Sir John Jeffcott's duel, fought near Exeter on May loth, 1833, with Dr. Hennis, who will be remembered in medical annals as the last English physician to die of duelling on English soil. In the days when doctors sometimes settled their differ- ences about disease and its treatment by firing at one an-i other with pistols or running upon one another with flashing swords, Dr. Antony Addington (first of Reading and afterwards of London, and father of the first Viscount Sid- mouth of political celebrity) steadily declined to meet — at ten paces, and for non-medical purposes — any of his pro- fessional brethren who had not graduated at either Oxford or Cambridge, a rule altogether in harmony with the pru- dence and nice discretion of the physician whose medical eminence was due to qualities that rendered him scarcely less powerful with politicians than famous amongst doctors. Born of gentle though not exalted parents, and educated at Winchester School and Trinity College (Oxford), Dr. Antony Addington had followed his profession with notable success, both as a physician and also as a proprietor of a private lunatic asylum, before he migrated to London in middle age, and, under the protection of the elder Pitt, stepped at once into lucrative and leading practise in the capital. In twenty-six years of such employment he ac- quired a measure of affluence that enabled him to purchase the reversion of a fine estate in Devonshire, and to with- draw from the labors of his profession to restful seclusion near the town in which he had first practised it. For nearly eight years had he enjoyed this retirement, when, on George DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 129 III/s illness (November, 1788), he was ordered by the Prince of Wales to proceed immediately to Windsor to con- sult with his Majesty's physicians on the cure of his Ma- jesty, one of these physicians being the courtly and well- dressed Henry Revell Reynolds, the last of London's silk- coated physicians, even as Dr. James Hamilton was the last of the great Edinburgh doctors to wear, for ordinary cos- tume, a cock-hat on his head and buckles on his shoes. Deli- cately precise and curiously foppish in every particular of his costume — the well-powdered wig, silk coat, breeches, stock- ings, buckled shoes, gold-headed cane, and lace rufHes, the costume he donned at the dawn and wore in the evening of his professional career — Revell Reynolds was a courtly coxcomb to the last, his care for the elegance and faultless- ness of his apparel extending even to the orders he gave for his last toilet. The weakness, that was a part of his strength, suggested the lines for his epitaph : Here well-dressed Reynolds lies, As great a beau as ever; We may perhaps see one as wise, But sure a smarter never. To speak of Antony Addington is to think how honor has come to the leaders of medicine, and how they and their children have risen to dignity. Honor cannot be said to have flowed to them in strong and steady stream, on the contrary, it has come to them in a rivulet so weak and un- certain that even to this day no physician, however great may have been his services to science and society, can claim promotion to the lowest grade of hereditary dignity, or even aspire to it, unless, whilst serving science and society, he has also been in the service of the Court. It is a question whether Edmund Greaves (the young physician who was at Oxford during the civil troubles whilst the Cavaliers held the University) received a baronetcy from Charles I., or de- served the sneer with which he was styled a "pretended baronet" by Anthony-a-Wood— a question, by the way, that could be set at rest by reference to the Oxonian "Docquet 130 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL Book." If the Cavalier doctor received the dignity with which he is credited in the fifth edition of "GuiUim's Heraldry," Sir Hans Sloane, instead of being the first, was the second physician to win the hereditary distinction from a sovereign. But even in that case Sir Hans Sloane's baronetcy would remain the first of the strictly "medical baronetcies"; i. e., the first of the baronetcies conferred on leaders of "the faculty" in consideration of their professional eminence. Though he was a doctor of promise and aca- demic mark at the time when he is alleged to have won the bloody hand, Dr. Edmund Greaves was no leader of his profession ; and if he received so great a mark of the royal favor, the honor must have been bestowed on him either in recognition of his loyalty or in reward of services that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been rewarded with money, or for some other consideration that, were it known, would forbid the medical annalist to rate the crea- tion, in strict parlance, as a medical baronetcy. Since the Cavaliers surrounded Charles at Oxford, seventy years had passed, when Dr. Hans Sloane was raised to the baronetcy in consideration of his services to science, and of the honor and influence pertaining to him as a leader of the medical profession. The year of the incident so memor- able in the annals of science and medicine was 1716. It follows, therefore, that the order of the baronetcy had existed for upwards of a hundred years, and the world was well on in the eighteenth century before it occurred to an English sovereign that supremely eminent physicians might with propriety be elevated, in consideration of their pro- fessional services, to the order of those dignified Commoners who are the lowest grade of the hereditary aristocracy. Social sentiment has changed on many questions touching the relative worth of eminent individuals since Sir Hans Sloane's elevation was canvassed by nice critics as a daring and possibly dangerous innovation ; and of late years the opinion has grown stronger and more general, that if it is well for the sovereign to reward their services to the State with grants of hereditary grandeur, doctors of the brightest DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 131 light and foremost leading should be rewarded with a dignity something higher than the honor that is bestowed as a matter of course on every well-reputed merchant who, in the capacity of Lord Mayor of London, entertains Royalty with a Guildhall banquet. Now that a poet has been raised to the peerage in consideration of the excellence of his poetry, it is conceivable that some eminent physician or sur- geon may not close his brilliant career without figuring as the junior baron of the Upper House. In that case, though he would live in the annals of his profession as the first medical peer, even as Sir Hans Sloane is remembered as the first of medical baronets, he would not be the first person in our island's story to begin life with the medical students and fight his way to a seat and coronet amongst the peers. Though the "Extinct Peerages" are silent on the point, it is matter of some record that Sylvester Douglas— the barrister-at-law who edited "Re- ports/' the politician who represented Fowey in successive Parliaments, and the busy placeman who in his time held divers offices of dignity and emolument, before and after his elevation to an Irish barony — was an apothecary before he went to the bar, a fact that was of course remembered to his disadvantage, and proclaimed to his ridicule by sprightly wits and envious rivals when the adventurer of humble origin was on the point of assuming the style and privileges of nobility. "What's his title to be?" cried Sheridan, turning for a moment from his hand at cards to one of a throng of lis- teners about the whist-table. "What's Sylvester Douglas to be called?" "Glenbervie — Lord Glenbervie," was the answer, "Glenbervie !" rejoined the wit, discharging a carefully prepared impromptu — "Glenbervie, Glenbervie, What's good for the scurvey? For ne'er be your old trade forgot; In your arms rather quarter A pestle-and-mortar, And your crest be a spruce gallipot." 132 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL Sylvester Douglas was made into Lord Glenbervie in the first year of the present century. Thirty-six years later Henry Bickersteth afforded another instance of a medical practitioner who, passing from medicine to law, rose to nobility. The son of a country doctor, Henry Bickersteth was in the first instance educated to succeed to his father's practise at Kirby Lonsdale, from which purpose he was diverted by the counsel of the fifth earl of Oxford, whom he accompanied in the capacity of medical attendant during that nobleman's Continental travels. Acting on the advice of the patron whose daughter he subsequently married, the young surgeon went to Cambridge, where he in due course became Senior Wrangler and First Smith's Prizeman, passed from Caius College to the Inner Temple, and, rising to be Master of the Rolls, entered the House of Lords as Baron Langdale in the twenty-sixth year from his call to the bar. It was thus that the able lawyer and fine-natured gentle- man was saved from obscurity and advanced to greatness. Had he either missed the good adviser, or wanted the cour- age to take the good advice, he might have lived and died a Westmoreland apothecary, instead of marrying into the house of the Harleys ; and contributing to the lustre of the law. But to regard the most remarkable case of promotion from the lower division of the medical profession, the reader must return to the eighteenth century of England's story and observe a career that, beginning in a drug-shop, closed in ducal dignity. Some uncertainty covers the steps of Hugh Smithson's earlier manhood, but it cannot be gainsaid that, the son of a Yorkshire baronet's younger son, he was educated to be an apothecary, and for a brief period fol- lowed the calling of an apothecary in Hatton Garden. On the other hand, it cannot be questioned, that in the period of his lowliest the young man of gentle descent, charming ad- dress, and fine presence looked confidently to the future for a brighter and more honorable career. Still young, on suc- ceeding to the Smithson baronetcy on his grandfather's demise in 1729, he sold the business he blushed in later DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 133 time to remember, and, withdrawing from Hatton Garden, hastened to a better neighborhood and more congenial scenes, with "Excelsior" for his motto. His purpose being to rise in life, it is not wonderful that so prudent, handsome, and adroit a gentleman achieved his ambition. The only wonder is that he achieved it so completely. Even to the self-con- fident adventurer it was surprising to rise so high. For a few years he figured amongst the modish connoisseurs and dilettanti of the town. Possessing quite as much learning as was needful for a man of fashion, he affected somewhat more, and he shone for a brief while as a luminary of the Society of Antiquaries — a society he joined in 1736 and quitted in 1740, a few months before the town was startled by the news that the handsome baronet would soon marry the Honorable Elizabeth Percy, the only child of Lord Percy, next in succession to the dukedom of Somerset. It accords with all that is known of Sir Hugh's prudence that he did not aspire so high until the lady informed him frankly that he might do so. The story ran that Sir Hugh had fixed his affections on a beauty of far inferior fortune and de- gree, and was smarting under the lady's disdainful rejection of his suit, when the fair Percy proclaimed in a crowded ball- room her low opinion of the lady's judgment and her high opinion of Sir Hugh's merits. Words thus spoken to the whole world, in order that they should be carried to his ear, afforded Sir Hugh all the consolation he needed and all the encouragement their generous utterer wished to give him. Marriage ensued quickly, and in the following year the baronet who had married a baron's daughter be- came a duke's son-in-law. Eight years after his accession to the dukedom of Somerset, Lady Elizabeth's father was created Baron Warkworth, of Warkworth Castle, county Northumberland, and Earl of Northumberland, with re- mainer to the husband of his only child. Another year, and on his father-in-law's death Lady Elizabeth's husband be- came (1750) Earl of Northumberland and Baron Wark- worth. What more in way of grandeur could the whilom apothecary of Hatton Garden require? He asked for more 134 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL and got it. An act of Parliament empowered him and his countess to take the surname and arms of Percy. In 1757 he was installed a Knight of the Garter; in 1766 he was created Earl Percy and Duke of Northumberland; in 1784 he obtained the barony of Lovain of Alnwick, with remain- der to his second son, Lord Algernon Percy. What a stream of dignities to descend on the head of the man who had let blood and worked a pestle-and-mortar in Hatton Garden! He could afford to smile on hearing how low fellows in the coffee-houses said his ducal coronet ought to be garnished with senna-leaves instead of strawberry-leaves. It was of this fortunate man's son (the second duke) that a poet of the "Anti-Jacobin" wrote : Nay, quoth the duke, in thy black roll, Deductions I espye. For those who, poor, mean, and low, With children burthened lie. And though full sixty thousand pounds My vassals pay to me. From Cornwall to Northumberland, Through many a fair countree; Yet England's church, its king, its laws, Its cause I value not, Compared with this, my constant text, A penny saved is got. No drop of princely Percy's blood Through these cold veins doth run; With Hotspur's castless, blazon, name I still am poor Smithson. Satire, however, is seldom severely veracious, and the writer of these caustic lines was less than precisely truthful in saying that no drop of Percy blood ran in the veins of poor Smithson, for through his grandmother, Elizabeth, daughter of Marmaduke, second Lord Langdale, the Hatton Garden apothecary was lineally descended through divers female ancestors from John, Lord Neville (of Edward Ill's time) and his wife, Maud de Percy, daughter of Henry Lord Percy. DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 135 In the survey of the honor that has come to medicine in the persons of its celebrated practitioners or their famiHeSj account must be taken of the doctors who have married into noble houses, and also of the doctors whose children fought their way into the peerage or acquired nobility by wedlock. Sir Lucas Pepys married the Countess de Rothes ; Sir Henry Halford married a daughter of the eleventh Lord St. John of Bletsoe ; and the farcical Sir John Hill became the son- in-law of the scarcely less eccentric and farcical Lord Rane- lagh. Sir Hans Sloane's two surviving daughters passed by wedlock into the noble houses of Stanley and Cadogan, Elizabeth carrying her father's Chelsea estate to the second Lord Cadogan, whose title has become the familiar name of the property. Marrying the niece and heiress of Sir Charles Saunders (whose surname he assumed on the oc- casion of the marriage), Dr. Huck, of St. Thomas's Hos- pital (1768- 1 777), bequeathed his great wealth to his two daughters, the elder of whom (Anne) became Viscountess Melville just four years before the younger (Jane) became the countess of Westmoreland. Of eminent physicians whose sons placed themselves amongst the peerage and founded houses that bid fair to survive to future centuries, two of the most remarkable cases were Antony Addington, already celebrated in these papers, and Dr. Denman, of Mount Street. Partly because he was only a doctor's son, a fact ever remembered to his discredit by his political opponents, and partly because he had himself prescribed a soporific pillow of hops for George in.'s relief in 1801, Henry Addington (in due course Vis- count Sidmouth) was nicknamed "The Doctor" by those who hated him for being Premier. More fortunate in winning greatness by m.eans that did not provoke ungenerous re- flections on his want of ancestral nobility, more fortunate also in the moral endowments that never fail to render their possessor acceptable to the world, Dr. Thomas Denman's son ennobled a family that is peculiarly associated with what is brightest and most honorable in recent medical an- nals. First cousin, on his mother's side, to Sir Benjamin 136 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL Brodie, the eminent surgeon, the first Lord Denman was by the marriage of his two sisters brother-in-law to the famous physicians. Sir Richard Croft, Bart., and Dr. Matthew BailHe. Whilst some of our Georgian doctors mated themselves with women of ancient lineage, others were fortunate in winning heiresses of commercial ancestry. One of these ladies (Miss Corbett, of Hackney) fell into the hands of Dr. Thomas Dawson, a gentleman acceptable to the Dissenters of George III.'s London alike as a physician and a preacher. A doctor on week days and a pulpit orator on Sundays, young Thomas Dawson was still in the freshness of his religious enthusiasm and personal comeliness when he found this lady of unusual goodness and many thousands sitting by herself with the Bible open before her. It may have been an accident that the Book was open at the page where Nathan says to David, "Thou art the man." It may have been an accident that the lady's forefinger called her visitor's attention to these particular words. Accidents sometimes in- fluence the course of man for good or evil. Anyhow, the circumstances that may have been accidental determined the young physician forthwith to drop upon his right knee and make a request which the wealthy Miss Corbett thought well to grant. In living happily with the lady who surrendered herself to him under circumstances at the same time so droll and so serious, Dr. Thomas Dawson was more fortunate than poor Dr. Cadogan of George II.'s London, whose domestic troubles were matters of sympathetic and humorous interest to his many fair admirers in the western quarters of the town. A Fellow of the Royal Society, as well as the Col- lege of Physicians, Dr. Cadogan had the wit to animate and the looks to fascinate fashionable womankind, when, at the height of his social popularity, he was so foolish as to marry — from motives that may be left to the reader's imagination — a lady who was commendable neither for youth nor beauty nor amiability. The marriage was still in the first year of its wretchedness, when it was whispered, on the lady's au- DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 137 thority, that, instead of being the faultless creature the world imagined him, the physician was a monster of false- ness and cruelty. On returning to his house one afternoon from a professional visit, this well-punished gentleman found his wife entertaining a numerous party of gentle- women with particulars of his arrangements for removing her by poison ! "He is killing me, my dears !" the lady was ejaculating hysterically, whilst her husband stood in the hall an attentive listener. "He is poisoning me ! I am dying — slowly dying of the poison he puts into my food and drink !" "Ladies," said the handsome doctor with his happiest nonchalance and best bow, as he entered the drawing-room, "Mrs. Cadogan is under a misconception. She has taken no poison. You have my permission to open her and satisfy yourselves that she is quite mistaken" — words which caused Mrs. Cagodan to proclaim him "a wretch !" at the top of her voice, whilst her friends whispered to one another that he was "a dear, droll, amusing creature!" It is for the reader to decide whether he should concur with Mrs. Cadogan or her friends. Dr. Cadogan's unlooked-for and inconveniently opportune return to his wife's salon reminds one of the great John Hunter's no less unexpected appearance at one of those re- unions of musical and otherwise delightful people in which the elegant and superlatively sentimental Mrs. Hunter de- lighted and her husband found himself very ill at ease. It is of no news that the philosopher, who made the world wise without being himself wise enough to keep his temper under control, did not live in unbroken harmony with his wife. It is matter of history — though possibly of scandalous history — that he did not make an altogether wise choice when he took to himself for better and worse the sister of that knightly knave, Sir Everard Home, who lived to bum his deceased brother-in-law's manuscripts after enlarging his own scientific reputation with some of the most impor- tant discoveries recorded in them. Not that Mrs. Hunter was seriously wanting in wifely loyalty and devotion to her su- 138 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL perb but rather trying husband. The worst that can be urged against her conjugal sufficiency is that whilst her husband took life in one way she took life in another ; that whilst he cared for nothing but the pursuits and operations of his lab- oratory, she was chiefly occupied with music and poetry and the pleasures of her drawing-room. It is needless to say that the gentlewoman who wrote "My mother bids me braid my hair," and a score of other scarcely less delightful ballads, surpassed in poetical feeling and ability another lady of the same surname whose doings are celebrated in the "Pick- wick Papers." It remains, however, that she and her husband would have been better matched had he been some- thing less devoted to science and she something less de- voted to society. Returning one evening from a journey some eight-and-forty hours sooner than he was expected, Hunter crossed his threshold only to be greeted with sounds of merriment, and to find himself surrounded with the usual signs of a fashionable reception. Decorated profusely with flowers and hothouse plants, the hall and staircase were lit with countless wax candles, and thronged with people un- known to the master of the house. In the rooms where refreshments were being served to the guests, who had been called together without his sanction, the man of science heard the hum and laughter of many voices, whilst strains of music came from the crowded drawing-room, to which the irritable philosopher directed his steps. Forcing a way more quickly than courteously to the middle of the principal chamber, he spoke these few but effectual words to the company, who from the moment of his abrupt entrance re- garded him with eloquent looks of speechless astonishment: "I knew nothing of this kick-up, and I ought to have been informed of it beforehand ; but, as I have now returned home to study, I hope the present company will retire." There was a quick departure of Mrs. Hunter's guests, and ere the last had gone away the many candles of her salons had been extinguished. If the lady deserved the punish- ment, it cannot be questioned that her friends were punished too severely. DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 139 Few doctors of George III.'s earlier time figured more bravely in London society than Sir John Eliot, who was so pestered by his fair and fashionable worshipers, that he had a death's head painted on the panels of his carriage, in the hope that the hideous device would frighten them from its wheels and render them less ready to stay his progress through the streets. On hearing that their delightful doctor was a married man, one of these too adorative ladies — the daughter of a peer and cabinet minister — vowed to assassi- nate the wife, who was so cruelly and unendurably in the way. Whilst Sir John Eliot (the Scotchman) lived with the courtiers and countesses, and enjoyed the favor of the heir-apparent to the Crown, London knew another Dr. John Elliot (a native of Somerset), with whom Madam Schwel- lenberg's physician may not be confounded. The knight who declined the matrimonial overtures of a peer's daugh- ter, because his wife would not allow him to marry her, was a very different person from the gentleman whose strange and tragic career is set forth in "A Narrative of the Life and Death of John Elliot, M. D., containing an account of the Rise, Progress, and Catastrophe of his un- happy passion for Miss Mary Boydell." Coming from Somersetshire to serve a London apothecary, somewhere about the time of Sir John Eliot's term of service to another London apothecary, the hero of this highly sensational biography fell in love with Miss Mary Boydell, niece of a London alderman, and had enjoyed for some considerable period the proud position of her affianced suitor, when it was his misfortune to read in a newspaper that Miss Boydell had been married on the previous day to some other man. Never doubting that the Miss Boydell of the newspaper was his Miss Boydell, the young apothecary sold his shop and fixtures, and fled from the city of heartless womankind, vowing he would pass the remainder of his days in communion with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Mr. John Elliot having gone off in this way, hard things were said of him by the deserted Mary, and still harder things by her uncle. Twelve years later, 140 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL having grown weary of living with the beasts and birds of rural haunts, Mr. Elliot returned to London, took another shop, and was doing well in business, when who but Miss Mary Boydell — ever a maiden, never a wife, all innocent of the faithlessness imputed to her — should appear at his counter, cry aloud, "Mr. Elliot! Mr. Elliot!" and fall into a swoon. After mutual and satisfactory explanations — ex- planations rendering it clear even to the meanest understand- ing that Miss Mary Boydell and the Miss Boydell of the newspaper were two different Misses Boydell — the re-united couple were soon a re-engaged couple. But again malicious fate separated the lovers. Their wedding day had been fixed and their wedding clothes provided, when Miss Mary Boydell jilted Mr. Elliot^ in order that she might render Mr. Nicols, an opulent bookseller, the happiest of men. In vengeance and despair the injured Mr. Elliot loaded a brace of pistols with powder and ball, and a second brace with powder and wadding, intending to frighten Miss Boydell excessively with the leadless pair, before putting a bullet into his own head. The reader may be left to imagine how this pretty plan miscarried in Princes Street after the lady had been properly frightened ; how Mr. Elliot was tried at the Old Bailey for attempting to murder Miss Boydell; how, after being acquitted of this capital charge, he was remanded to prison to take his trial for a common assault; and how, whilst awaiting his trial on this minor charge, he died of a broken heart and gaol fever in Newgate on July 22d, 1787, just eight months after Sir John Eliot, M. D., closed a very different and curiously successful career in the softest feather bed and courtliest quarter of the town. Making a deep impression on the popular mind, the equally mournful and ludicrous "Narrative of the Life and Death of John Elliot, M. D.," was fruitful of numerous ballads and chap-book stories based on its most thrilling incidents. It was also accountable for what is most piquant and absurd in the "Giles Bolus the Knave and Brown Sally Green," the burlesque ballad composed in ridicule of Monk Lewis's "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene." In DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 141 these days of literary and artistic revivalism it is conceivable that the mournful "Narrative," which has appeared in so many forms and with so many variations, may be called back to popular favor by some expert reproducer of old literary material. At the close of an essay dealing chiefly with medical love and womankind, reference may be made appropriately to the strange story of Dr. James Barry, whose name appeared so recently as 1865 in Hart's "Annual Army List" at the head of the list of Inspectors-General of Hospitals, a per- sonage not to be confounded, as he has been in certain places, with Dr. Martin Barry, F. R. S., who predeceased Dr. James of the same surname by just ten years. Entering the medical service of the army at a time when young men were often made army surgeons without having passed any severe or regular medical education, and at an age when the smoothness of his lips and chin was less remarkable than it became a few years later, young James Barry had scarcely joined the first regiment to which he was appointed when he distinguished himself by fighting a duel under remark- able circumstances. "Barry, you have a very peculiar voice for a man. I declare it might be mistaken for a woman's voice by any one hearing it for the first time without at the same moment seeing you," an officer remarked to the young surgeon at their common mess-table on a foreign station. "You are right," Barry replied, in a tone of peculiar significance that was the more curious because it was not expressive of anger or any other strong feeling. "I have a peculiar voice, which, as you say, might be mistaken for a woman's. But it is the only womanly thing you will ever discover in me." The next morning the young officer who had called atten- tion to the young surgeon's voice received a challenge from the gentleman who had declared with so curious a com- posure that his voice would be found his only feminine characteristic. In the days- of duelling such an invitation could not be declined, although the offensive speech had 142 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL been uttered without offensive intention. An explanation to that effect could be made after the meeting, but no sooner. So the young men met to exchange shots, and exchanged them. It was a meeting from which only one of them re- turned. Dr. James Barry remained in the service for more than fifty years without hearing another reference to the feminine pitch and quality of his voice. The sixth Earl of Albemarle, who met Dr. James Barry at the Cape in 1819, when the latter was acting there as staff-surgeon to the garrison and the governor's medical ad- viser, had heard enough of the doctor's eccentricities to be curious about him, and in his curiosity to gather some par- ticulars about him, that may be found in his lordship's en- tertaining "Fifty Years of My Life." A beardless lad with reddish hair, high cheek bones, and an unmistakably Scotch type of countenance, the doctor looked no older than his observer and eventual commemorator, but as the earl was born no further back than the last year of the last century, Dr. James Barry must in 181 9 have been something older than he looked. "While at the Cape," says Lord Albemarle, "he fought a duel, and was considered to be of a most quarrelsome disposition. He was frequently guilty of flagrant breaches of discipline, and on more than one occa- sion was sent home under arrest, but somehow or other his offenses were always condoned at headquarters." At the same time he was so capricious and quick to take offense that he had recently turned away in dudgeon from the gov- ernor (Lord Charles Somerset) and left him to prescribe for himself, on account of something (of no real importance) said or done to his displeasure by his lordship. The young- ster with hair and complexion indicative of a quick temper, who fought a duel about nothing and for the merest trifle, who could turn on his heel from the governor himself, may well have been credited with a quarrelsome disposition. The youthful doctor, whose influence at headquarters was strong enough to procure pardon for his frequent and flagrant breaches of discipline, may well have been DOCTORS OUT OF PRACTISE 143 whispered about at the miUtary messes as a social curiosity and enigma. Though there is no reason to question the accuracy and general fairness of the Earl of Albemarle's account of this perplexing doctor as he appeared and acted and was spoken about in 1819, it would be a mistake to think it a sufficient portrait of the gentleman jn the subsequent stages of his career. By persons who knew the doctor in his middle age, and in his much later time, it is certified that he was no less punctilious than efficient in the performance of his duty, and all other matters touching the tone and dignity of the service, and that the habitual courtesy of his address and bearing preserved his temper from suspicion. At the Cape the style of his conversation is said by the Earl of Albemarle to have been "greatly superior to that one usually heard at a mess-table in those days of non-competitive ex- amination," and to the last he compared favorably with most members of his profession by reason of the superior elevation and refinement of his intellectual tastes and in- terests. At all times a lover of music^ he became an en- thusiastic musician in his later time. Though his politeness was not innocent of formality, his speech to his friends and ordinary acquaintance was so far distinguished by ease and communicativeness that no one ever charged him with ex- cessive reserve and caution. In one direction alone could he be suspected of a disposition to secrecy, and of being the nervous and jealous guardian of an unusual personal story. No one ever heard him talk freely of his kindred or the cir- cumstances of his boyhood ; but though he differed from most men in this particular, he resembled in the same par- ticular far too many people for his comrades to infer from the reticence that he was the resolute keeper of any astound- ing personal secret. That he had nursed and guarded such a secret — and guarded it successfully for more than half a century in a way of life that rendered its preservation a task of peculiar difficulty — was discovered and proclaimed to the world im- mediately after his death in the July of 1865. On the day 144 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL following the announcement of his death in the Times it was officially reported to the Horse Guards that the late Dr. James Barry, Inspector-General of Hospitals, was a woman. For years the doctor had occupied the same set of rooms in Margaret Street, Regent Street, but neither the landlady of the lodgings nor the doctor's black servant had entertained even the faintest suspicion of the doctor's real sex and resolutely guarded secret. Whence came this woman who went through life from youth to old age in a man's habit, guise, occupation ? Mrs. Ward (Colonel Tidy's daughter) had grounds for believing and telling the Earl of Albemarle that Dr. James Barry was the honorably descended granddaughter of a Scotch earl, and "that the soi-disant James Barry adopted the medical profession from attachment to an army surgeon who has not been many years dead." One does not see why mere at- tachment to an army surgeon should have determined this daughter of a noble house to become an army surgeon her- self, or why the mere attachment should have determined powerful and exalted persons to befriend and protect her, and make it possible for her to adopt and persist in that masculine vocation. THE PROFESSION IN EARLY AMERI- CAN LITERATURE BY SAMUEL L. KNAPP THE PROFESSION IN EARLY AMERICAN LITERA- TURE (From Lectures on American Literature, Published in 1829) AMONG the Hterati of our country, in the different ages of her growth, may be numbered many eminent physicians, who were not only useful in their profession but distinguished for a spirit of inquiry and a knowledge of letters. At the first settlement of the provinces the clergy were the physicians and often the surgeons of the community. They practised in general without fees, from a re- ligious belief that they ought not to receive any compensa- tion for their services, as what they could do for the body was intimately connected with the cure of souls. This union of the professions had long been in use in Europe. The confessors of the convents and monasteries had made, in many orders, the healing art a part of their vows ; and after the suppression of the religious houses in England by Henry VIIL, the clergy still continued the art among the people; and, after the Reformation was entirely effectedj kept up the custom without any dread from the bulls against the practise of dissection. The first settlers of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay as well as those of Jamestown had physicians and surgeons with them. Gager, an eminent surgeon, came to Charleston in 1630, but soon fell a victim of what has since been called the spotted fever. He practised physic as well as surgery. Firmin, a physician and surgeon, in 1639 was settled at Ipswick but left the profession for that of divinity, which was the safest road to distinction in those days. The skill of the early physicians was speedily put to the test, for, besides the fever incident to the hard living of 148 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL new settlers, the small-pox and yellow fever were soon brought among them from the West Indies; and after several years the "cynanche maligna" baffled all their skill for a time. The measles, often an obstinate disease, was constantly among the new settlements. The yellow fever, which we trust has left forever most of our cities, prevailed in its most malignant form in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1699, 1703^ ^71'^^ 1739. 1740, 1745. 1748; and Dr. Harris says it was there in 1761 and 1764. This fever prevailed in Philadelphia in 1741, 1747, 1762, and 1793 ; in New York in 1792, 1798, and several times since. Hutcheson says that as early as 1693 it was prevalent in Boston, It came from the West Indies in the fleet of Sir Francis Wheeler, which was sent from that station to join the New England forces destined against Quebec. This fleet lost 1,300 sailors out of 2,100, and 1,800 soldiers out of 2,400. Previous to this period a disease swept through the country in 1647 the pre- cise character of which has never been known ; the Indians fell victims to it, as well as the European colonists, and in 1655 it was nearly as extensive and fatal. The small-pox was a great scourge; it prevailed in Boston in 1689, 1702, 1721, 1730, 1752, 1764, 1776, and in 1792; and the prob- ability is that it was as frequent in other cities. We state these facts to show that there were constantly subjects for the inquiries of the medical mind ; and as early as 1647, Thomas Thatcher of Weymouth, in Massachusetts, turned his attention to the subjects of diseases, and wrote a treatise on the small-pox and measles^ called "A Brief Guide in the Small-pox and Measles." He was a great man, learned as a mathematician and a practical mechanic, whose inventive genius was equal to his scientific acquirements. He was also a profound oriental scholar, and had explored all the wisdom of the East in the healing art. This treatise of Thatcher's was probably the first book written in this country upon any of the diseases incident to it. This eminent physician, scholar, and divine died at the age of fifty-eight; a greater man than whom this country has not since produced. At this time some of the physicians edu- IN AMERICAN LITERATURE 149 cated abroad, attracted by the novelty of a new country or dissatisfied with the old world, came among our ancestors to diffuse their information and to find new sources of knowledge. Robert Child, educated at the university of Padua, came to Massachusetts as early as 1646. The name of this physician was connected with an attempt made to diffuse a spirit of religious toleration, which received the censures of the magistrates, but which may form his eulogium now, however severe they were thought to be at that time. The next physician and surgeon of note in our annals is Gershom Bulkley of Connecticut, son of the learned Mr. Bulkley of Concord, in Massachusetts. He was a clergyman ; in Philip's war in 1676 was appointed sur- geon to the Connecticut troops, and such was the confidence of the legislature in his abilities that he was made, by their order, one of the council of war. The next publication from a professor of medicine that I can find, but probably my researches may not have been so thorough on this subject as on some other subjects, was one of Dr. Douglass on the small-pox, whose character I have sketched in a former lecture. He was opposed to in- oculation and ridiculed Boyleston, who was there in 1721, introducing the practise of it. This provoked Boyleston to a defense. Cotton Mather had his share in the dispute ; he was in favor of the practise. At this time Nathaniel Williams, a clergyman, a schoolmaster, successor to old master Cheever, and a distinguished physician also, being a good-natured man, wrote a humorous dialogue upon this dispute entitled "Mundungus, Sawney, Academicus, a De- bate" ; these names glanced at the different characters who had been distinguished in the dispute ; and it is said to con- tain the argument on both sides of the question, as far as facts had then developed principles. The old physicians spoke of this work with great respect. Williams was a man of such benevolence and sincerity, that in that day of gratuitous epithets, he was called "the beloved physician." The next work was a treatise on pharmacy by Thomas Harwood, a good medical writer of some eminence. This 150 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL work was published in 1732. In 1740, Dr. Thomas Cad- wallader published an essay on the "Iliack Passion," which gave him great celebrity in this country and in England. In 1745, he published some medical papers in the "Royal Transactions, London." This was the mode pursued by eminent physicians in this country ; for the fact of appear- ing in such a publication was sufficient to ensure the atten- tion of the public, or that part of it one would wish to at- tract. Dr. Cadwallader was one of the first professors in the medical art, who, in this country, taught his pupils from hospital practise ; being one of the visiting physicians in the Philadelphia hospital, which was founded in 1752. Previously the subject of plants had attracted the atten- tion of men fond of pursuing nature in "the herb and flower." Mark Catesby had the honor of being among the first engaged in this pursuit in this country. He was sagacious and indefatigable, but his works are far inferior to Clayton's "Flora Virginiana." The history of the labors of this great botanical work is very singular. The art of printing and engraving in this country would not admit of printing a flora here ; he therefore sent his production to Leyden, to Professor Gronovius, who published it in several editions; the first of them in 1739, the second in 1743, the third in 1762. Clayton began this work in 1705, when the forests were extensive, and when the lily of the valley and the mountain daisy breathed their fragrance on the same gale. Dudley and Douglass, whom we have named before, were at the same time engaged in the same pursuit. Clay- ton's descriptions of the plants he collected are remarkable for neatness and accuracy, and often beautiful and elegant. It is a fact worthy of notice that some of the finest descrip- tions to be found anywhere, are in the v/orks of naturalists and botanists. Some descriptions of plants by Linnaeus, Darwin, and their fellow-laborers in the garden of nature, are models of beauty ; and what can surpass in splendor Buffon's description of the horse, the peacock, and the eagle ? Every part of our country puts in just claims for dis- IN AMERICAN LITERATURE 151 tinction in the medical profession; Doctor William Ball of South Carolina, who was a graduate of Harvard College, defended a medical thesis with ability at Leyden, in 1734. He was for many years eminent in his native State. Doctors Thomas Bond and Middleton made the first public dissection, in 1750. This was done by leave of a court of law. Josiah Bartlett of Exeter, New Hampshire, wrote on the "cynanche maligna," which had been prevalent in New England ; and John Jones wrote at the commencement of the Revolutionary War, a treatise "on wounds and fractures," for the use of the army. I have collected these facts, with many others that I shall not trouble you with, respecting the medical faculty, simply to show that this profession has had its share in the literature of the country. Within the half century, it is well known that in Europe and in this country they have raised the standard of the profession, by banishing as far as possible all empyricism from their borders. This is a profession in which ignorance has heretofore so often hid herself and gulled the world by pretensions, that the satirists have in every age poured out upon it their surcharged vials of wrath ; but the historian now sharpens his pen to write their praise. Hippocrates describes a quack, as a being "no lav/s could reach, and no ignominy disgrace." The medical pro- fession has often wisely resorted to letters for immortality. It is not the cure, but the record of it only, that we can see. To prove the altitude of the medical character in our country we need only look to the earliest medical school in America. When, in 1768, a medical college was estab- lished in Philadelphia, what a cluster of distinguished men were collected to give it popularity. Shippen, Cadwallader, and a host of others were ready and active ministers of science to diffuse its advantages. "A good physician" (says the Scriptures) "is from the Lord"; and to continue the oriental phraseology — a Hospital well regulated, and bounti- fully endowed to heal the maladies of the mind and body, may be said to be a "perpetual lamp of life in the temple IS2 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL of nature"; and those whose duty it is to watch, should never slumber nor sleep on their posts. At the time of the Revolution there was a goodly num- ber of active men in the profession of medicine who took a part in the conflict. Warren, Church, Bull, Finch, and others had taken the place of Perkins^ Cutter, Clarke, and others in Massachusetts ; and in other States there were also many of the physicians who were an effective and active class of men. They had defects, no doubt, in their educa- tion, for they had many difficulties to contend with, but none that could not be overcome. Many of them had distin- guished themselves by their writings in favor of civil liberty, and it was necessary for them to push forward and take an active part. Some of them entered the army professionally, and others gave up the lancet for the sword. Among the officers of the army of the Revolution, whose profession had been that of physic were: Warren, Mercer, St. Clair, Gadsden, Cobb, Brooks, Bricket ; and who were braver than they? In political life, the profession has been conspicuous; before the adoption of the federal constitution the profession could number some of the first men in Congress from their body. And since the constitution has been in operation there have been also many of distinction in public life. As orators, there has been no small share of eloquence among them. This has been proved in the halls of legislation often, but more often and more happily in the lecture room ; there the subjects are neither artificial nor conventional, but nat- ural, and nature makes her votaries eloquent. As poets as well as warriors, the medical faculty has been distinguished. We have, in our account of American poets, mentioned Hopkins, Church, Warren, Ladd, Bryant, Shaw, Boyd, Percival, and other bards, who, while they plucked the mistletoe as Druids, analyzed, as chemists and philos- ophers, the nut gall of the same oak on which the parasite had grown. It is impossible to mention all in a short course of lectures ; but I cannot pass over some names without paying a tribute to their virtue, if it be only in a hasty breath. In every great enterprise, more depends upon the IN AMERICAN LITERATURE 153 character of the few who zealously engage in it than upon the many who may take cursory and imperfect views of it, and with only faint motives for its prosperity. It was for- tunate that such a man as Rush should have been found at the close of the Revolution, to assist in building up an American school of medicine. He was fitted for the task. His temperament was ardent, and his feelings enthusiastic ; he had the rare faculty of communicating this enthusiasm to others; and his pupils pursued their inquiries with an impetus, derived from him, which carried them rapidly and pleasantly through the labyrinths of science. His elo- quence, his arguments, and his love of labor did much to break the spell which hung over the profession, "that no man could he qualified for a professor, in any of the branches of medicine, who had not been in a foreign school." He taught that nature was the same in every country, and that when she was properly interrogated her responses would be the same at all times. The medical school at New York has had a share of the intelligence of the country in every stage of its growth ; James, Middleton, and others, distinguished in their day, have been succeeded by men of science and letters. The medical school of Harvard University was in con- templation for many years, and liberal donations had been made for the purpose of its establishment, but the situation of the country forbade its commencement until 1782. Dr. John Warren, brother of General Warren who fell at Bunker Hill, ardent in his patriotism as any man that ever lived — who entered the army as a common soldier after the death of his brother, probably from the strong excitement at this event, and continued in it as a surgeon for several years — was at the head of this school. He had at this time left the army and settled in Boston, in his profession, among his brother's friends, and had before 1782 delivered a course of lectures on anatomy. The students of Harvard University had an opportunity of attending them. When the school was opened at Cambridge within the college walls, Warren was put at the head of the newly estab- 154 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL lished institution, and Doctors Dexter and Waterhouse were also appointed professors. Dr. Warren was well qualified for this important situation ; he had genius, patience, in- dustry, and eloquence, and all were required for the com- mencement of such a School. He secured the understanding of his hearers while he charmed their imagination, and without a struggle he led them through the course of his lectures with pleasure, admiration, and profit. The army had been a good school for him, for there he had witnessed the diseases of camps and the wounds of battles, and no lesson was lost on such a mind. He, like Rush, had the faculty of inspiring his pupils with love, confidence, and admiration, and, at the same time, with an ardent passion to excel in their profession. The influence of his example was more powerful than his precepts in teaching the many axioms he wished to inculcate. Independent of his pro- fessional fame, he has left some excellent specimens of his taste and talents as a classical writer. He has left a son who is among the first of his profession, and who does great credit to the advantages which his father gave him, and who, by his attention to the progress of knowledge, has quartered new honors on his arms as a professional man. The medical school of Dartmouth College was the fourth institution of the kind which was founded in this country. In 1798, Dr. Nathan Smith was appointed sole professor, and for many years lectured on all the usual branches of medicine taught in a course of medical instruction. This was indeed a Herculean task, but he met it manfully, pass- ing from one subject to another with astonishing ease. His labors were often embarrassed by the cavils of the sus- picious and envious ; but he marched on, in the dignity of conscious genius, and conquered a prejudice at every step. He, too, had a spice of that enthusiasm which dis- tinguished his great predecessors and coadjutors in the task of building up the schools of medicine. He, too, had elo- quence to assist him in making his way against a thousand evils. He passed from the grave to the pleasant with such readiness that the delicate shades of the transitions were IN AMERICAN LITERATURE 155 not always noticed ; but when the history of our great men is written out, the enterprise, genius, perseverance, and suc- cess of Dr. Nathan Smith, will be remembered by every lover of science. It will not be necessary to speak of others, or to follow up the progress of the healing art to the present day, as this has been done with great ability by several distinguished medical gentlemen ; my only object being in these details to show the course of intelligence in this country in this de- partment of knowledge as well as in other branches which are more directly in our path, in the pursuit of whatever can give us pleasure, intelligence, or profit. DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE CHARMS, TALISMANS, AMULETS, ASTROLOGY, AND MESMERISM BY PROFESSOR HENRY DRAPER DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE F we regard the mass of people among whom we are Hving, we are soon convinced that intellect- ually as well as bodily they are of very different ages. Unfortunately the proportion of those adult in mind is but small compared with those adult in body. Most men are in the infantile or child-like condition. When, therefore, we speak of the high intelligence of the age we must remember that the remark applies to the few, and that these types of advance disseminate ideas with more or less difficulty through the masses. Nay, more, if too far ahead of the times, generations may elapse before their writings are credited. Because the community as a whole does thus lag behind the age, it is of interest to us as physicians to study the medical ideas of former times, for we shall find that all those beliefs are prevailing in the various grades of society and must be contended with and often, alas! submitted to. It is instructive to the philosophical physician to trace, as in the case of Greece, the passage through fetichism, miracle- cure, and astrology to a sound system of medicine such as that propagated by Hippocrates, well called the Divine Old Man. In the rest of Europe — and from this point of view Americans are Europeans — the same progress has taken place as its nations have passed through their infancy and childhood toward the adult condition. In considering the cures of all ages they may be divided into two classes: first, cures by imagination; and second, cures by remedies, drugs, or hygiene. Under the former head should be put miracle-cures, invocation, exorcism, astrological medicine^ amulets, charms, talismans, and mes- merism ; and under the latter a large part of the present plan of treatment, alchemical in its origin, in which drugs i6o DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL are relied on to crush disease. This will eventually be suc- ceeded by the expectant and sustaining system, such as Hippocrates taught when he says that disease is caused by fermentations and other chemical changes in the fluids of the body, and that relief comes when such substances are discharged ; that such changes may be local, as in erysipelas, or general, as in a fever. The power of the physician is to be shown by helping on the elimination. He should watch carefully the progress of the disease, and guide it without trying to stay it. When he has learned the course of a disease, he may predict the issue of a case from experience. Let us, then, in the first place, consider : cures depending ON THE IMAGINATION, apparently so supernatural. That the mind can exercise a strong influence over the body might be proved by a thousand instances. Even such an insensitive tissue as the hair is authentically stated to have turned white from grief or fear. As Scott in "Mar- mion" says : For deadly fear can time outgo, And blanche at once the hair. The sad case of Marie Antoinette will occur to every one's mind, although the French revolutionists accounted for that in another way. Jaundice has been caused by a paroxysm of anger, and the relief of toothache by ascend- ing a dentist's steps. Who has not suffered from a fit of the blues, when "the soul melteth away for very heaviness" ? Macbeth may well say to the physician: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain ; And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? But more than this Chaucer sings — Men may die of imagination, So depe may impression be take; 4 bv • ^ may be local, as ver. The power of the piiNsician is to on the elimination. He should watch i of the disease, and guide it without When he has learned the course of a • — "ic may predict the issue of a case from experience. V, then, in the first place, consider: cures depending ON THE IMAGINATION, apparently so supernatural. That the mind can exercii' ' ng influence over the body might be proved by a ti uistance*?. Even such an insensitive tissue as the hair is authentically stated to have turned white from grief or fear. As Scott in "Mar- mi on" savs : For (^eadly fear can time outgo. The sad case of Marie Antoinette will occur to every one's mind, although the French revolutionists accounted for that in another way. Jaundice has been caused by a paroxysm of anger, and the relief of toothache by ascend- ing a dentist's steps. Who has not suffered from a fit of the blues, when "the soul melteth away for very heaviness" ? Macbeth may wfll ssy to *be physician : Canst thou tict minii-or m a minu uiscasea; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain ; And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuflFed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart.? rr^nre t^^^ tbis Chaucer sings — Mr ■ ■ -■?, Sc . .J..: DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE i6i and it is well known that Sophocles died of joy when his last tragedy was crowned with success. Conversely, the body can react on the mind ; for Voltaire profoundly remarks that the fate of empires is decided by the intrigues of women and the constipation of kings. Taking for granted, then, that imagination can govern the operations of the body in instances where the impression is strong enough, consider the case of a nation in its in- fancy. Every natural object contains a good or bad spirit, and multitudes are wandering disembodied through the air. Draper's "Intellectual Development" well may say of the Middle Ages of Europe : "In its opinion the earth, the air, the sea, were full of invisible forms. With more faith than even by paganism itself were the supernatural powers of the images of the gods accepted, only it was imputed to the influence of devils. The lunatic was troubled by a like pos- session. If a spring discharged its waters with a periodical gushing of carbonic acid gas, it was agitated by an angel ; if an unfortunate descended into a pit and was suffocated by the mephitic air, it was by some daemon who was se- creted ; if the miner's torch produced an explosion, it was owing to the wrath of some malignant spirit guarding a treasure, and whose solitude had been disturbed. There was no end to the stories, duly authenticated by the best human testimony, of the occasional appearance of such spirits under visible forms; there was no grotto or cool thicket in which angels or genii had not been seen; no cavern without its daemons. Though the names were not given, it was well understood that the air had its sylphs, the earth its gnomes, the fire its salamanders, the water its undines ; to the day belonged its apparitions^ to the night its fairies. The foul air of stagnant places assumed the visible form of daemons of abominable aspect ; the explosive gases of mines took on the shape of pale-faced malicious dwarfs, with leathery ears hanging down to their shoulders, and in garments of gray cloth." Surrounded by such objects of marvel and fear, was it wonderful that men adopted the notion that disease was a I& DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL possession by devils ? When a patient was struggling in an epileptic fit, did it not indeed seem as if a demon was striv- ing to obtain possession of his body, and was not exorcism by holy men, and fervent prayer for aid by some benign spirit, a natural resort for their infantile and fetich-ridden minds ? Such beliefs were as real to them as the ghosts of a dark room are to children now. A profound desire to conciliate and form alliances with powerful spirits or with the devil was, therefore, a natural consequence of those times, and hence arose the various practises of magic and the belief in witchcraft. It is im- possible for me to point out clearly the periods when these ideas originated, flourished, and died^ because in a mixed community there are men of all intellectual ages, the in- fants being perhaps half a dozen centuries behind the adults, and all cherishing their own delusions. Multitudes of the superstitions of the Middle Ages flourish under our very eyes. I have but to mention a horseshoe to bring the fact home. Even among the most cultivated a leaven of super- stition survives ; and while we may blame Celsus for attrib- uting diseases to the anger of the gods — "Mcrhos ad nam deorum immortalium relates esse" — we should remember that many gentlemen and ladies of to-day will pale with fear if salt is spilled, and would as soon see their death-warrant signed as sit down thirteenth at a dinner. As physicians and physiologists, such things must not anger you ; you must humor them as the delusions of children, not contradicting unless you wish to be overwhelmed with a myriad of in- stances in point. The obvious result of supernatural disease and forms of cure was the coalescence of the functions of priest and physician in one person, and a resort to all kinds of magic, divination, sacrifices, incantations, exorcisms^ and eventually mercenary practises. Even as early as A. D. 366, the Council of Laodicea found it necessary to forbid the study and practise of enchantment to priests ; but the temptation to persist and gain money by terrifying the sick and dying was so great, that the Lateran Council, A. D. 1123, had to DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE 163 forbid all medical attendance by the clergy, and that of A. D. 1 1 39 threatened the disobedient with excommunica- tion. Medicine was never completely severed from theology till physicians were allowed to marry. There is a singular resemblance between this state of affairs and that in Greece 1,500 years before, just previous to the time of Hippocrates. As the idea of fetichism died out among the more intel- ligent classes of Europe, the gods and demons who had inhabited surrounding objects were exiled to more distant spheres, and became controllers of the planetary motions. Simultaneously astrology arose, and horoscopes, nativities, and mansions of the sky filled the minds of men. Mackay remarks : "An undue opinion of our own importance is at the bottom of all our unwarrantable notions in this respect. How flattering to the pride of man to think that the stars in their courses watch over him, and typify by their move- ments and aspects the joys or the sorrows that await him! He, less in proportion to the universe than the all but in- visible insects that feed in myriads on a summer leaf are to this great globe itself, fondly imagines that eternal worlds were chiefly created to prognosticate his fate. How we should pity tke arrogance of the worm that crawls at our feet if we knew that it also desired to know the secrets of futurity, and imagined that meteors shot athwart the sky to warn it that a tomtit was hovering near to gobble it up 1" There is, nevertheless, a delusive basis for astrology, for in certain great natural phenomena the influence of distant orbs is plainly traced. The moon and sun conjointly rule the tides ; the aurora and the magnetism of the earth seem to depend on eruptions and cyclones in the sun ; maxima and minima of death are related to the rotation of the earth on its axis, and the inclination of that axis to the plane of the orbit. There is even a subtler connection : for chemistry has shown that, with one or two exceptions, all the force upon the globe, whether exhibited in the simple process of com- bustion or in the highest manifestations of animal life, is only a minute fraction of the power sent forth from the i64 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL central luminary and transmuted here. Living beings are truly children of the sun. The astrologers were not, however, content with any such general proposition. Lilly, in a copy of his work, published in 1647, that I have used, says: "There is nothing apper- taining to the life of man in this world which in one way or another hath not relation to the twelve houses of heaven; and as the twelve signes are appropriate to the particular members of man's body, so also do the twelve houses rep- resent not onely the severall parts of man, but his actions, quality of life, and living; and the curiosity and judgment of our forefathers in astrology was such as they have allotted to every house a particular signification, and so distin- guished humane accidents throughout the whole twelve houses as he that understands the questions appertaining to each of them shall not want sufficient grounds whereon to judge, or give a rationall answer upon any contingent acci- dent and successe thereof." In this book of 900 pages there is a world of quaint and curious information ; the planet Saturn, for instance, "signifieth one of a swart color, palish like lead, or of a blacke, earthy brown ; one of rough skin, thick, and very hairy on the body ; not great eyes ; many times his complexion is between blacke and yellow, or as if he had a spice of the blacke or yellow jaundies ; he is leane, crooked, or beetle-browed ; a thin whay beard ; great lips like the black-Moores ; he lookes to the ground ; is slow in motion ; either is bow-legged or hits one leg or knee against the other ; most part a stinking breath ; seldome free from a cough ; he is crafty for his own ends, seducing people to his opinion ; full of revenge and malice, little caring for the church or religion ; it's a foule, nasty, slovenly knave ; a great eater, or one of a large stomacke ; a brawling fellow ; big, great shoulders ; covetous, and yet seldome rich." Three planets, it appears, "signifie cures of diseases: If by money and good councell ; ^ by medicine ; $ by magick naturall, divine assistance, or chance." Werenfels, speaking of an astrological believer, says: "He will not committ his seed to the earth when the soil, DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE 165 but when the moon, requires it. He will have his hair cut when the moon is either in Leo, that his locks may stare like the Lion's shag, or in Aries, that they may curl like a ram's horn. Whatever he would have to grow, he sets about it when she is in her increase ; but for what he would have made less, he chooses her wane. When the moon is in Taurus he never can be persuaded to take physic, lest that animal which chews its cud should make him cast it up again. If at any time he has a mind to be admitted to the presence of a prince, he will wait till the moon is in con- junction with the sun, for 'tis then the society of an inferior with a superior is salutary and successful." And Hudibras believes in The Queen of Night, whose vast command Rules all the sea and half the land, And over moist and crazy brains In high spring-tides at midnight reigns. Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Trinculo that Caliban is a moon-calf — that is, a brute spawned by the moonlight on the scum of the sea — because he has "a very ancient and fish-like smell ; a kind of, not of the newest." The accom- panying figure of a horoscope is from Lilly's book, and the text explaining it is as follows: JUDGMENT OF THE FIGURE AFORESAID. The signe ascending; vis., HOP is in the figure most afflicted by the corporall presence of ^, who is partly lord of the eighth house; therefore from that house and signe must we require the disease, cause, and member grieved. «« being the signe of the sixt, is fixed, afflicted by T; and ^5, who is lord of the sixt house, is in y, a fixed signe, earthly and melancholy, of the same nature and triplicity thatTtP, the signe ascending, is of; the 3 being a general significatrix in all diseases, being afflicted by her proximity to 7^, and posited in the ascendant in an earthly melancholy signe, together with the other significators. did portend the patient to be wonderfully afflicted with the spleen, with the wind-cholick, and melancholy obstructions in the bowels and small guts, small feavers, a remisse pulse; and as the signe KtP is the signe ascending, and 3- and ^ therein, it ar- gued, the sick was perplexed with distempers in his head, slept un- quietly, etc. {All which was true.) i66 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL TRabetber tbe Stcft woul& live or t)^e, ant) vvbat bis disease was. I perswaded the man to make his peace with God, and to settle his house in order, for I did not perceive by naturall causes that he could live above ten or twelve days. To this very day a lingering confidence in planetary dom- ination is retained. The moon is believed to regulate the weather, and particularly the fall of rain, when, in truth, she has nothing whatever to do with it. So in our present almanacs one page usually contains the figure of a man with associated signs of the zodiac. As Southey describes it: "There Homo stands, naked but not ashamed, upon the two Fishes, one foot upon each, the fish being neither in air, nor water, nor upon earth, but self-suspended, as it appears, in the void. Aries has alighted with two feet on Homo's head, and has sent a shaft through the forehead into the brain; Taurus has quietly seated himself across his neck ; the Gem- ini are riding astride a little below his right shoulder. Th^ whole trunk is laid open, as if part of the old accursed pun- ishment for high treason had been performed upon him. DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE 167 The Lion occupies the thorax as his proper domain, and the Crab is in possession of the abdomen; Sagittarius, vo- lant in the void, has just let fly an arrow, which is on the way to his right arm ; Capricornus breathes out a visible in- fluence that penetrates both knees ; Aquarius inflicts similar punctures upon both legs ; Virgo fishes, as it were, at the intestines; Libra at that part affected by schoolmasters in their anger ; and Scorpio takes the wickedest aim of all." This figure is stated by Champollion to be derived by de- scent from the Egyptian ritual for the dead, and is often found in their papyri. So, again, doctors still put at the beginning of a prescrip- tion the astrological sign for Jupiter, 2( looking like r, and supposed to mean recipe. I might multiply observations upon astrology ad in£nitum; for hundreds upon hundreds of books have been written in various tongues, some legible and some utterly incomprehen- sible, some by arrant impostors, but more by men full of faith. But we must pass to other Imagination-cures, such as talismans, amulets, and charms. It is only necessary in closing to state that in early Christian times the hold of Greek and Latin astrology was found to be so strong that the Church had to countenance it, but, of course, the names of heathen deities were suitably replaced. For instance, in the left hand the top joint of the thumb was dedicated to the Saviour, the second joint to the Virgin ; the top joint of the forefinger to St. James, the second to St. John the Evangel- ist, the third to St. Peter ; the first joint of the second finger to St. Simon, the second to St. Matthew, the third to St. James the Greater, etc. Talismans were natural objects, generally imagined to be marked like the signs of the planets or zodiac, but sometimes they were precious stones. They are confounded to a cer- tain extent with amulets, which Arabic word signifies any- thing suspended. Charms, on the other hand, from the Latin carmen, a song, refer to written spells, collections of words often without sense, like the famous Abracadabra^ In the time of the Crusades, as so interestingly narrated i68 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL by Scott in the Talisman, faith in the virtues of precious stones was universal, and to each was attributed special properties. The heliotrope, or bloodstone, now worn in seal rings so much, "stancheth blood, driveth away poisons, preserveth health ; yea, and some write that it provoketh raine and darkeneth the sunne, suffering not him that beareth it to be abused." "A topaze healeth the lunaticke person of his passion of lunacie." The garnet assisteth sorrow and recreates the heart; the chrysolite is the friend of wisdom and enemy of folly. The great quack, Dr. Dee, had a lump of cannel-coal that could predict. In the fancied resemblances found among talismans none are more extraordinary than those associated with color. Because Avicenna had said that red corpuscles moved the blood, red colors must be employed in diseases of that fluid, and even in 1765 the Emperor Francis I. was wrapped up in scarlet cloth to cure the small-pox, and so died. Flannel dyed nine times in blue was good for scrofula. Among amulets that of Pope Adrian was curious : it con- sisted of dried toad, arsenic, tormentil, pearl, coral, hyacinth, smaragd, and tragacanth, and was hung round the neck, and never removed. The arsenic amulets worn during the plague in London were active on the principle that one poison would prevent the entry of another. Ashmole's cure for ague was to take, early in the morning, a good dose of elixir, and hang three spiders about his neck, "which drove it away, God be thanked." Such statements may cause a smile, and men may say that it is well-nigh incredible that similar silly superstitions should ever have seriously influenced people ; but the laugh is soon turned if we inquire whether any of these beliefs have come down to our time. How many now think there is virtue in camphor to prevent infection ; that sulphur or a horse-chestnut in the pocket is good for rheumatism ! Go to Italy and see grown-up men carrying amulets, like a partly extended hand, to prevent the effects of the evil-eye. Coral is still worn as recommended by Paracelsus for infants, and many add the mineral bells of silver, by which sorcerers DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE 169 and witches may be frightened off, on the same principle that bigger bells were used to scare comets away. Perhaps in this latter instance mothers act unwittingly, and only know by tradition that there is some good in the toy, for in many cases usage has continued a practise the significance of which is lost. As an illustration, necklaces and bracelets were orig- inally not articles of ornament, but real amulets ; those found on Egyptian mummies are carved with characters relating to the future of the body, the scarabseus, or tumble-bug, typifying symbolically by his performances the resurrection. With regard to charms a wrong idea prevails: the true charm is written, and is not a natural or carved object; watch charms are in reality talismans or amulets. The vir- tue that resides in such verses is very great, for Cato the Censor says that a dislocation may be reduced by taking a reed four or five feet long, cutting it in the middle, and let- ting two men hold the ends opposite one another. While this is doing, say, "In Alio S. F. Motas vaeta, Daries Dardaries Astaries Dissunapitur," then separate them with a piece of iron, and bind them to the dislocation. It has been naively remarked that this system of cure works best in nervous and periodical disorders. The phylacteries of the Pharisees were charms. Allied to charms was faith in numbers, and particularly in odd numbers. "There's luck in odd numbers, says Rory O'More," or, to go back a few centuries, "Numero Deus impare gaudet" (God enjoys an odd number) ; or, still earlier, hear Pythagoras declare that number is the essence or first principle of things. Singularly enough, modern chemistry, in adopting the atomic theory and symbolic nota- tion, seems to lend itself to this conclusion, for it couples hydrogen with i, oxygen with 16, etc.; and our daily papers attribute special powers to the seventh daughter of a sev- enth daughter, as the advertising columns show. The taint of old things hangs about us yet. Perhaps of all forms of cure the most miraculous, not in its effects, but as illustrating the credulousness of men, and their utter blindness to contradictions staring them in the 170 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL face, was the royal touch for king's-evil. Of course no scrofulous patient ever could have been benefited, and yet Charles II., between May, 1662, and April, 1682, touched 92,107 persons ; he had to set a regular day, Friday, for the purpose, and often touched 250 persons at a sitting, pre- senting each with a touch-piece of gold. I suspect that this gift must have had something to do with the number of cures, for impostors were drawn by multitudes, and yet he had the patients sifted out by his surgeon before they were presented. Johnson, the great lexicographer, when four years old, among others, was touched by Queen Anne, but without avail. How such a belief could have been sustained surpasses comprehension ; but yet many of you may remem- ber Dr. Newton and his imposing of hands, in the vicinity of Cooper Union, within a few years. On the imagination-cures I have thus far spoken of, all, doubtless, put a common estimate ; but in the next, the last I shall refer to, people now would begin to divide; and should I venture into our own times and mock at psychic force and table-tipping, angry passions might rise and har- mony be disturbed. Mesmerism originated at the same period as our Revolu- tion, and was in reality an attempt to replace demons and spirits by a natural force — magnetism — and thus come into relation with the spirit of the times. By the ingenious co- alescence of truths established by experiment with statements resting on nothing, multitudes were, and are still, deluded. Mesmer began by expounding a truth which is more and more forcing itself on the attention of scientific men : "That the sun^ moon, and fixed stars mutually affect each other in their orbits ; that they cause and direct in our earth a flux and reflux not only in the sea but in the atmosphere ; that there is a medium of a subtile and mobile nature which per- vades the universe, and associates all things together in mutual intercourse and harmony." Sure enough, electricity is such a medium. The application of magnetic ideas to cure does not belong to Mesmer : it had been practised long before, for Paracelsus DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE 171 gives a method of transplanting diseases from man into the earth : "Take a magnet impregnated with mummy and mixed with rich earth ; in the earth sow some seeds that have a congruity or homogeneity with the disease ; then let this earth, well sifted and mixed with mummy, be laid in an earthen vessel, and let the seeds committed to it be watered daily with a lotion in which the diseased limb or body has been washed. Thus will the disease be transplanted from the human body to the seeds which are in the earth. Hav- ing done this, transplant the seeds from the earthen vessel to the ground, and wait till they begin to sprout into herbs ; as they increase the disease will diminish, and when they have arrived at their full growth it will disappear altogether." Kircher had a remarkable plan for reducing hernia, con- sisting in putting a poultice of iron filings on the outside, and then causing the patient to swallow a magnet, ground to powder, which, when it arrived opposite the spot, would draw in the tumor. Magnetism was also applied to surgery, and gave rise to weapon salves, which were an improvement on those of ancient times, such as the following, recommended by Para- celsus : "Take of moss growing on the head of a thief who has been hanged and left in the air, of real mummy, of human blood still warm, each one ounce ; of human suet two ounces ; of linseed-oil, turpentine, and Armenian bole each two ounces. Mix all well in a mortar, and keep the salve in an oblong narrow urn." The sword was to be dipped in blood from the wound and anointed with the salve, and put in a cool place. The wound was to be kept clean, covered with linen, and dressed every day. Dryden, in his Tempest, has the following dialogue be- tween Hippolito and Miranda : Hip. Oh! my wound pains me. Mir. I am come to ease you. [She unwraps the sword. Hip. Alas ! I feel the cold air come to me ; My wound shoots worse than ever. [She wipes and anoints the sword. 172 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL Mir. Does it still grieve you? Hip. Now methinks there's something Laid just upon it. Mir. Do you feel no ease? Hip. Yes, yes: upon the sudden all the pain Is leaving me. Sweet Heaven ! how I am eased ! Pettigrew, in his valuable work, speaking of such salves and sympathetic powders, says : "It is not at all surprising that cures of this description should soon be looked upon as the result of magic, incantations, and other supernatural means, and that the professors of the sympathetic art, there- fore, should have been anxious to account for the effects by natural causes. Such appears to have been Sir Kenelm Dig- by's chief aim before the doctors of Montpellier, and sim- ilar reasonings upon the subject may be found in the writ- ings of the supporters of the system already mentioned, who advocated the plan of treatment, and vouched for its effi- cacy. In this search for natural means to account for the phenomena obtained, the obvious one was overlooked, and the history I have given would have been uninteresting but for the valuable practical lesson which these experiments have afforded. We owe to this folly the introduction of one of the first principles of surgery — one which in this country has done more to advance the science than any other be- sides — one which has saved a vast amount of human suf- fering, and preserved innumerable lives. The history of the doctrine of healing wounds by the power of sympathy is the history of adhesion, the history of union by the first in- tention — a practise which until the time of John Hunter was never fairly developed or distinctly comprehended. . . . An incised wound is the most simple of its kind ; this, it must be remembered, was the description of wounds to which the sympathetica! curers resorted, and their secret of cure is to be explained by the rest and quiet which the wounded parts were permitted to enjoy, in opposition to the ordinary treatment under the fallacious doctrine and prac- tise of that day of digesting, mundificating, incarnating, etc. Surgeons in former times seem really by their modes of DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE 173 treatment to have tried how far it was possible to impede, instead of to faciHtate, the processes of nature, and to those who are acquainted with modern surgery it almost appears miraculous that they ever should have been able to have produced union of any wound whatever. What is the mode of treatment now employed by a surgeon in the healing of a wound ? To clear it from extraneous matter, to bring the edges in apposition, to keep them in contact by a proper bandage, to modify temperature, and to give rest. What is this but the mode of procedure on the part of the sympathet- ical curers? They washed the wound with water, kept it clean and undisturbed, and in a few days the union of parts — the process of adhesion — was perfected, and the cure was complete. The doctrine of adhesion — the exudation of lymph, the junction of old or the formation of new vessels, and the consequent agglutination of parts — was then ill understood ; subtle and in many instances, it must be admit- ted, ingenious reasons were resorted to to account for the eflfects produced, and the true solution of the process was overlooked. The effect was apparent, but the cause was obscure." Mesmer's operations depended on exciting the imagination by every device that could appeal to the senses. His house was luxuriously furnished, lighted by the richest stained glass, perfumed by the most overwhelming odors, and filled with a sighing of sweet music and soft female voices. Ac- cording to Mackay's description: "In the centre of a saloon was placed an oval vessel about four feet in its long- est diameter and a foot deep. In this were laid a number of wine-bottles filled with magnetized water, well corked up, and disposed in radii with their necks outward. Water was then poured into the vessel so as just to cover the bottles, and filings of iron were thrown in occasionally to heighten the magnetic effect. The vessel was covered with an iron cover pierced with many holes, and was called the baquet. From each hole issued a long movable rod of iron, which the patients were to apply to such parts of their bodies as were afflicted. Around this baquet the patients were directed to 174 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL sit, holding each other by the hand, and pressing their knees together as closely as possible, to facilitate the passage of the magnetic fluid from one to the other. Then came in the assistant magnetizers, generally strong, handsome young men, to pour into the patient from their finger-tips fresh streams of the wondrous fluid. They embraced the pa- tients between the knees, rubbed them gently down the spine and in the course of the nerves, using gentle pressure on the breasts of the ladies, and staring them out of coun- tenance to magnetize them by the eye. Gradually the cheeks of the ladies began to glow, their imaginations to become in- flamed, and off they went one after another in convulsive fits." But enough of such perilous proceedings and the libertine societies based upon them ; let us turn to systems and to CURES by remedies. All treatment by drugs was based on alchemical ideas, which in their turn were an offshoot of pantheism. The whole world has a soul ; hence every object has a soul or spirit, which may, by suitable means, be expressed or so- licited out. Fire and distillation, with incantations and charms, enable the philosopher to subtilize and purify these essences, and ascertain and utilize their various properties. So a spirit could then, as now, be procured from wine more powerful than the wine, and a ghost evoked from chalk able to tear apart the strongest metal vessel. The spirit of the most noble of metals was long sought for as the elixir of life. Geber is made to say it should assuredly cure all maladies, for gold is the only metal without disease ; but when he discovered aqua regia, and had the gold in a potable or dissolved condition, how intense must have been his disappointment! It is devoid of curative property. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, however, discov- ered enough of the secret of life to animate a figure of brass, and make it perform the duties of a domestic ; house- keepers say that a brazen kind of servant exists to this day. Upon equally authentic testimony it is asserted that Alain de Lisle added sixty years to his life, and a recipe by Arnold di Vilanova shows how to add one hundred years. Rub DELUSIONS OF MEDICINE 17S yourself two or three times a week with marrow of cassia; every night put a plaster of saffron, rose leaves, sandalwood, aloes, and amber liquefied in oil of roses and wax over the heart. In the morning inclose the plaster in a leaden box ; eat chickens that have been first starved and then fed on a broth of serpents and vinegar thickened with wheat and bran. I might go on with these details for days, from the ethereal discoveries of Heydon, the Rosicrucian, who thought a man might live without eating or drinking, and that there was a "fine foreign fatness" in pure air, and that a plaster of nicely cooked meat on the epigastrium would satisfy the most voracious — through all the search for the elixir vitae, the philosopher's stone, and the powder of projection, up to those really grand discoveries which lie at the bottom of modern chemistry, and are the basis of our daily comforts and present medication. But we have had enough of the follies of our ancestors : let us delude ourselves into the be- lief that we are men and they were children, and leave to future times the pleasing task of pulling us to pieces, and laughing at our faith in drugs and fragmentary knowledge of the real course and nature of disease. When science has displaced quackery ; when the organic chemistry of the body is understood, and missing ingredients can be supplied and noxious ones expelled ; when dangerous germs are filtered from the air men breathe, the food they eat, and the water they drink — then medicine will become exact, and cease to be uncertain. The ground-work for such hopes is partly found in the tendency that the advanced medical men of this day have to determine the efficacy of treatment by experiment, and not by faith and hypothesis. To be sure, the patient must be encouraged to hope for the best results, and not be harassed by the doubts that beset the mind of his physician, to whom the empirical nature of treatment is only too obvious. But more efficacious than this has been, and will be, the abandonment of the idea that, in addition to a soul, the body of man presents another, lower form of spirit — a vital 176 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL force which regulates the ordinary actions of the system, and dominates over and counterbalances the usual physical forces that rule the inorganic world. Such an idea strikes at the root of all application of exterior experiment to living beings, and is a relic of the fetich-worshiping ages of nations, when every breeze was the breath of a demi-god, and every cloud a frown — when the crashing lightning was a bolt sped by Jove, and the thunder the angry rolling of his car. It is associated with the time when naked savages were praying to the spirit of a dried cow's tail. In these days of the impersonality of force, men know that there is no power which can resist that fiat of Om- nipotence, the natural laws, ruling equally an ultra-micro- scopic atom or a succession of worlds stretched throughout the infinity of space. There is, therefore, a reason that phy- sicians should apply discoveries of actions seen in the outer world to the inner workings of the body ; and hence organic chemistry, the microscope, the spectroscope, methods of phy- sical exploration, electrical conductions and inductions, the- ories of germ origin of disease, etc., are applied to investiga- tion and cure. SOME QUACKS SOME QUACKS N spite of all moral condemnation, one cannot avoid a certain admiration for a bold and successful im- postor. Boldness and shrewdness are captivating in themselves — Becky Sharp, though detestable, is sublime. Milton meant that we should admire his Satan, Scribe has a comedie vaudeznlle, I remember, which appeals entirely to men's admiration for successful charlatanism. So well known is this trait, that some men in politics, as Wilkes, the English demagogue of the last century, and cer- tain American politicians of the present century, or there- abouts, are shrewd enough to win on their barefaced reputa- tion for demagogery. It is one of the dangers of free government that many people like a trickster, if he is only bold and entirely without scruple. To every condemnation of his morals, men rejoin that he is "mighty smart," or, as they say in England of a famous living statesman, "awfully clever." The mob likes the man who goes to extremes, says Brougham. The showmen who frankly do business on their reputation for skilful imposture are far less blameworthy than those political^ medical, and clerical humbugs who handle more vital things than "Cardiff giants" and "What- is-its." But one cannot help being amused even with these im- postors. A vulture is interesting from some standpoints. There are books filled with the exploits of quacks ; but what I want to do here is to run a naturalist's pin through a few smaller specimens of the humbug family, of the medical genus, whom I have known. The common resort of quacks in the times of a generation or more ago was Thompsonianism. I have heard that Thompson's little book, containing all the secrets of thera- peutics, was sold for twenty dollars, the buyer binding him- i8o DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL self not to communicate these mysteries to any other person. As the Thompsonians used only vegetable remedies, and for the most part simples, they were called "root-doctors," and from their use of "steam-sweats," by means of boiled Indian corn packed about the patient, they got the sobriquet at the West of "corn-doctors," but more commonly of "steam-doctors." Any bold-faced ignoramus might set up for a steam-doctor ; it was Gil Bias's "universal dissolvent" come back again^ for there is nothing new even in quackery. The "steam-doctors" sneeringly dubbed the regular physi- cians "calomel-doctors" — a term rendered appropriate by the excessive use of mercury fifty years ago. I think it is O. H. Smith, in his "Sketches," who relates that a certain ig- norant fellow, in the interior of Indiana, bought a book and removed to a new settlement, where he set up for a "root- doctor." A friend who met him inquired after his success. He got on very well, he said. He thought "root-doctorin' a good deal better than calamus-doctorin'. He'd had a case the other day of a sick woman, and he thought he'd just try the calamus-doctor's plan, so he dug up some calamus and give it to her, and she died." A blacksmith in one of the river counties of Indiana set up for a "botanic-physician," and when I knew him was very rich. A steamboat pilot in the same county, with no educa- tion at all, removed to Brooklyn, and engaged very success- fully in cures by rubbing. He claimed to have learned all his secrets by a revelation made in a dream, and he kept a sort of hospital, generally well filled with rich fools. Some of the theories which the root-doctors came to hold were very amusing. I know a minister of prominence in the West, who was once a "student" or office-boy for one of them. He relates that the doctor sent him into the woods to get some of the inner bark of the butternut-tree. "Tom," said the doctor, as he departed, "I want you to scrape this bark downward. It is for a cathartic. Don't scrape it upward, or it will be an emetic. And whatever you do, Thomas, don't you scrape it both ways. If you do, nobody on earth can tell how it will act." SOME QUACKS 181 But these were small fry. The rarest specimen of the quack that I have ever known Hved in an important city on the upper Mississippi, and practised curing by mesmerism. Happily he is dead now^ though I make no doubt that other quacks have taken his place. This Doctor X. had failed in a very remarkable way, as some men do, in commercial business, and had set up as a mesmeric doctor, though I be- lieve he practised on an "As-you-like-it" system. To the scientifically inclined patient he was a mesmerist, to the pious he was a man who cured by the power of faith ; and he was accustomed to remark, with great austerity, that if the Protestant ministers of the city had as much faith as he, they could work as wonderful cures as he did — which, I believe, was the only strikingly true thing he ever said. To spiritualists, again, he was a medium. His method of cure was by the laying on of hands. He stood with his hands on the patient's head for about five minutes each day. He not only cured, but he diagnosticated the disease in the same way. For half the secret of success in quackery lies in the au- dacity of your pretension. "Toujours I'aiidace" is the legend of every impostor who wins. It was better than a play to see grave clergymen, lawyers, and other prominent citizens file into the office of a morning to have the solemn old hum- bug put his magnetic paw upon their heads. Among his patrons were prominent public men, and the Governor of the State himself. The Governor urged me to go to him, because, as he said, the man talked most rationally. Meeting "Doctor" X. one day in a public library, I sought to hear his theory of healing. He expounded it almost in these words : "I put my hand upon the patient's head, and bring the sensorium of my brain into contact with the sensorium of the patient's brain. Then I send a subtle current of etherium all over the patient's system, stimulating all his organs into activity. Then I make my examination. I do not want the patient to tell me anything about his symptoms — symptoms are apt to mislead. But I begin with the upper lobe of the brain ; if I find that all right, I proceed to the middle lobe ; i82 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL then the lower lobe, or cerebellum ; and if I find a coagula- tion of blood at the top of the spinal cord, I know that the patient has epilepsy, and so on." A Jew by the name of Quohn was my neighbor. He was a merry-hearted fellow, in spite of the intolerable agony of eighteen years of asthma, which a little later caused his death. He went to see Doctor X., of course, and the exer- tion of climbing the doctor's steps set him a-wheezing like the steam-engine at a blast-furnace. Placing his hand on Mr. Quohn's head, the wise doctor pronounced the patient to be suffering from asthma. This was a remarkable token of skill, and the patient suffered himself to come under the doctor's hand for five minutes a day during the next five or six weeks, at fifty cents each time. At last, finding his asthma steadily growing worse, he gave over, laughing mer- rily at his own stupidity. "I t'ink," he said to me one day, "t'at Doctor X. has cot a coot teal of magnetic power." "What makes you think so?" I asked. "How could he traw eighteen tollars and a half out of my pocket if he hadn't?" he gasped. Whenever I speak or write of any manifestation of super- stition or ignorance in the West, I am sure to meet some Eastern man who speaks deprecatingly of Western barbar- ism, as though any one section of the country held a monop- oly of ignorance and gullibility. Such a one has only to read the advertisements of clairvoyants in the New York papers to see how many people, in what is called "society," go to see seventh daughters of seventh daughters, or wonderful astrologers. During the first year that I was in New York, I was talk- ing one day to a prominent journalist. He was speaking highly of a clairvoyant doctor in the West, to whom he was about to forward a lock of hair of one of the most celebrated clergymen in the metropolis. It seems that this clairvoyant physician could tell the disease and prescribe medicines by means of a lock of hair. My friend proceeded to mention that the wife of a certain New Englander, of world-wide SOME QUACKS 183 fame, had been ill a long time, and that at his suggestion a lock of her hair had been mailed to this great clairvoyant, who had complained that the hair was not cut off close enough to the head. A second lock of hair, cut closer, served the purpose, and brought a correct diagnosis and a beneficial prescription. When this recital was ended, I broke out into some skeptical ravings about the absurdity of all this, finally saying: "Why, that's as bad as old Doctor X., whom I used to know at ." "Doctor X. of ?" responded my friend; "why, that's the very man !" You see how much more susceptible of deception the wild West is than New York and New England. The excellent New England lady has since died, in spite of X.'s prescrip- tions, and the eminent metropolitan clergyman did not re- cover from his disease by means of X.'s prescription. I cannot but admire X.'s ingenuity, however. At home he despised physic, and wrought all by his omnipotent hand. For the absent he prescribed as above. By these ingenious and thrifty acts he acquired a competence, and became a connoisseur in fruit-growing at his country place. There is flourishing just now a rich and famous quack, who lives near New York, but who finds much of his har- vest among the intellectual people of Boston. A gentleman who had been worried by his friends and family to submit a lock of his sick child's hair to this man at length consented, and, taking a pair of shears to sever a ringlet from her head, he observed that her hair was very similar in color to that of a pet dog lying on the pillow beside her. So he snipped off one of the poodle's curls and sent it. It is needless to add that the child's disease was very correctly described by return of mail ! Of course, quacks always take refuge in something that has an air of mystery. Why a clairvoyant should know any more than anybody else, or why an Indian remedy or an Egyptian doctor should be valuable, it would puzzle one to tell. You have only to peruse the board-fences and dead- l84 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL walls to understand how much quackery depends on this love of far-fetchedness. When I was but a little boy, my brother and myself dis- covered that the lime made by burning the shells of some species of clams or mussels which are very abundant on the Ohio served excellently to polish silverware^better, per- haps, than the articles now sold for the purpose. What boy has not made his wonderful invention at some period of his life? We were intent on making our fortunes. We manufactured ugly pasteboard boxes, and put up a quantity of shell lime. We could not peddle it ourselves without sacrificing the dignity of the family. There was, however, a venerable junkman, with a hand-cart, who went about the streets of New Albany in that time. On application to him he consented, after trying it, to sell it for us on com- mission. We delivered the whole stock at once. The junk- man wanted a name for it. By dint of looking steadfastly at the Venetian blinds in the window, one of us originated the name of "Venetian Polish." But the junk-dealer said that would not do. People liked French things. So he pro- ceeded to dub it "French Venetian Polish," and, without listening to any remonstrances on our part, he marched off, sold the article, but forgot to make any return to the manu- facturers. I often think that many patent nostrums are named about as intelligently as our poor "French Venetian PoUsh." I have heard, or read, that there was in one of the larger Western towns a man who called himself an "Indian doc- tor," who was all the vogue, to the great chagrin of the regular physicians. At last he had an amputation to per- form, and the consulting physicians, regardless of the pa- tient, stood off to see the ignorant man make a fool of him- self. To their surprise, he performed the operation well. One of the doctors took him aside and inquired how he knew so much of surgery, upon which the quack showed a diploma, saying that he knew he should starve if he did not pretend to quackery. Upon this being reported to the others, one of them said : "We'll ruin him now," which they did by SOME QUACKS 185 reporting everywhere that he was a regularly educated phy- sician. Indian medicine among the Indians themselves is, for the most part, blind superstition and arrant imposture. The savages can dress wounds fairly well, and they may know some simples that are good, but not half so good as the remedies in use among civilized people. Their chief reliance for a cure seems to be the keeping up of an unearthly howl- ing over the bed of the patient, by way of driving off the evil spirits. It is only the state of semi-savage ignorance of scientific matters in which the prevalent methods of educa- tion leave our people that makes them so eager to accept Indian, Persian, Egyptian, or American quackery in prefer- ence to scientific treatment. One of my schoolmates was hard of hearing. In his childhood, the physicians having failed to relieve the deaf- ness which came as one of the sequels of a fever, the family resolved to consult a famous "Egyptian doctor" in Cincin- nati, and a relative of mine was the messenger for this pur- pose. This Egyptian doctor, who was only a shrewd negro, perhaps with accomplices, did not ask for a lock of hair, but wished to have the middle finger of the sufferer dipped into water in a certain way, so that only the middle of the finger should be wetted. The water was then bottled and taken to him. In the present case he complained that others had put their hands into the water, and it was necessary to make a second trial ; by the time this was done, the doctor had secured information enough to startle the family, and greatly increase his reputation for the possession of the black art. I suppose one must attribute to the singular inefficiency of our school systems the strange tendency to superstition in medicine, as well as much narrow prejudice in other matters, so prevalent among the mass of our people. I have known families who regularly employed two physicians in their families — an allopathic physician for the adults and a homeopathist for the children — on the plan, I suppose, of giving to each one pills according to his size. I have known i86 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL people, otherwise sane, to stand an asthmatic boy up against a growing tree, bore a hole at his exact height, and insert a lock of his hair, driving in a peg after it, and then cutting the hair from his head. The superstition is that when the boy grows above that lock of hair, his asthma will vanish. Among more ignorant people, the blood of a black hen is sometimes used for erysipelas, and the oil of a black dog is applied for rheumatism^ and, to my knowledge, astonishing cures of consumption have been wrought by administering internally the oil from a large black dog. Pills made of spider-webs cure the ague, and so also will caterpillars worn around the neck as beads. The two last are similia similibus — the shuddering produced by the remedy cures the shaking of the ague, I suppose. Something of the same notion is found, no doubt, in the application of the flesh of the rattle- snake to cure its own bite. There is, possibly, a real benefit from this, the tissues of the newly killed snake absorbing some of the poison that would otherwise be distributed through the human system. One of the rarest quacks I have ever known was a man whose mind was positively feeble in everything but cunning. He was greatly sought after as a doctor for children by peo- ple who would not trust him to treat grown folks — the measure of his intellect being just suited to the size of a child. He was always boasting of his success. "How are you, Doctor W. ?" I said, one day. "I am well, and my patients are doing well, too," he answered characteristically. He took an active part in politics and secret societies, for the sake of talking about his patients, until he became a by- word. Once in a political meeting he was appointed on a committee. Instantly he was on his feet. "Mr. Chairman," he drawled, "I hope you'll excuse me. I must leave the house at once to see a patient." "Mr. Chairman," cried another, "I hope you will excuse Doctor W. and let him go to see this patient. This is the first patient he has had in a month." I have had this man assure me that a patient would get SOME QUACKS 187 well, when he was actually and visibly in the very article of death from consumption at the moment, and was dead in an hour afterward. The ignorant quack probably believed what he said. He was only a children's doctor, and could not be expected to know whether a grown man was dying or only getting well. In i860 I met, in Manitoba, a great medicine-chief of the Crees, who was called in French "Grandes Oreilles," a name that easily translates itself into English as "Long Ears." But the medicine-man is not such a donkey as his victim. A year or two later^ a chief's son at Manitoba was very low of pneumonia. All the incanta- tions and dervish howling and dancing of the medicine-men could not vanquish the disease. So a white physician was called in. He used a stethoscope to examine the lungs, and the savages watched him in mute astonishment as he handled the flexible rubber tube with silver end-pieces. The Indian got well, and Grandes Oreilles plaintively confided to a white man of his acquaintance that he himself could have cured the young man easily if he had had that little silver thing which the white doctor used to make him well. Some years ago, a fellow lay dead drunk in one of the streets of New York. Some rollicking medical student pushed through the crowd that surrounded the drunken man, and declared immediately that the man was not drunk, but suffering from a bad attack of strabismus, and was likely to die. This horrified the crowd, and each man repeated the story to his neighbor, with every pretense of knowing all about the dreadful disease. At last one of the medical pro- fessors came to the outskirts of the crowd and made inquiry, upon which he learned that there was a man dying of stra- bismus. Just this trick of imposing on the imagination by words not understood, the makers of medicine almanacs play from year to year. And not they alone. How many physicians who should know better do the same thing, by affecting a learned jargon quite incomprehensible to com.mon folks. And how many have made reputations to which they are not entitled, by adroitly pretending that their cases were very bad ones. i88 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL "How little you know of medicine!" cries the wife of a ne'er-do-well doctor, in a French play ; "when anybody calls you, you say, *Oh, that's a matter of a few days,' instead of telling him that he is very sick." That quacks often work cures is not wonderful if we con- sider how many diseases originate or have to do with mor- bid nervous conditions. The violent mental shock given to a pilgrim at Lourdes or Knock, by the excitement of ex- pectation and of sympathy, might well cure many cripples from paralysis or rheumatism. There was a miracle-worker in New York, a few years ago, who cured some most ob- stinate cases of paralysis by "faith." A lady told me that she sat in the chair of an eminent surgeon-dentist when his wife returned from visiting this wonder-worker, quite recovered from a paralysis of nine years' duration. She was able to walk from the carriage alone, and the emotion of the poor lady and her husband was very touching. I be- lieve, however, that the relief was only temporary, and I doubt not it is usually so. In all such cases, the will and imagination of the patient are violently wrought upon, and will and imagination are great therapeutic agents. It was through such excitement of the patient's feelings, no doubt, that the old kings of England cured so many thousands by touching them. "God heal you and give you a better mind," said the unbelieving William III. to one poor soul who came to be touched. There is grotesque Irony in the fact that Charles II. is said to have worked more cures than any other person in history. As the world comes out of its babyhood, and men under- stand more and more how inflexible are the laws of life, the quack and miracle-monger will find their occupation gone. Nothing is so much needed as a good, healthy skepticism. For it is better to suffer rheumatism, fevers, and palsies of the body than to endure the paralysis of the understanding which is the inevitable result of credulity and superstition. THE LEARNED APOTHECARY BY PORTER DAVIES, M. D. THE LEARNED APOTHECARY N an act of Parliament made in 1815, entitled, "An act for the better regulating the practise of apothe- caries," there is a very salutary clause, which en- acts : "That from and after the first day of August, 181 5, it shall not be lawful for any person (except persons already in practise as such), to practise as an apothecary in any part of England or Wales, unless he or they shall have been examined by the court of examiners of the apothe- caries' company, and shall have received a certificate as such." The first conviction under this act took place at the Staf- fordshire Lent assizes of 1819, before Sir William Garrow, when the apothecaries' company brought an action against a man of the name of Warburton, for having practised as an apothecary without being duly qualified. The defendant, it appeared, was the son of a man who, in the early part of his life had been a gardener, but afterwards set up as a cow leech. The facts were stated by Mr. Dauncey for the prosecution, and supported by evidence. Mr. Jervis, for the defense, called the father of the de- fendant, Arnold Warburton, to prove that he had practised as an apothecary before the passing of the act. Cross-examined by Mr. Dauncey. Mr. Dauncey — Mr. Warburton, have you always been a surgeon ? Witness appealed to the judge, whether this was a proper answer. The Judge — I have not heard any answer ; Mr. Dauncey has put a question. Witness — Must I answer it? Judge — Yes ; why do you object ? 192 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL Witness — I don't think it a proper answer. Judge — I presume you mean question, and I differ from you in opinion. The witness not answering, Mr. Dauncey repeated — Have you always been a surgeon ? Witness — I am a surjent. Mr. Dauncey — Can you spell the word you have men- tioned ? Witness — My lord, is that a fair answer? Judge — I think it a fair question. Witness — S-y-u-r-g-u-n-t. Mr. Dauncey — I am unfortunately hard of hearing ; have the goodness to repeat what you have said, sir. Witness — S-u-r-g-e-n-d. Mr. Dauncey — S — , what did you say next to S, sir? Witness — S-y-u-r-g-u-n-d. Mr. Dauncey — Very well, sir; I am perfectly satisfied. Judge — ^As I take down the word sur — , please to favor me with it once more. Witness — S-u-r-g-u-n-t. Judge — How, sir? Witness — S-e-r-g-u-n-d. Judge — Very well. Mr. Dauncey — Sir, have you always been what you say? that word, I mean, which you have just spelt? {A long pause.) Mr. Dauncey — I am afraid, sir, you do not often take so much time to study the cases which come before you, as you do to answer my question. Witness — I do not, sir. Mr. Dauncey — Well, sir, will you please to answer it? (A long pause, hut no reply.) Well, what were you orig- inally, Doctor Warburton? Witness — S-y-u-r-g-e-n-d, Mr. Dauncey — When you first took to business, what was that business? Were you a gardener, Doctor Warburton? Witness — S-u-r-g-e-n-t Mr. Dauncey — t do not ask you to spell that word again ; THE LEARNED APOTHECARY 193 but before you were of that profession, what were you? Witness — S-e-r-g-u-n-t. Mr. Dcmncey — My lord, I fear I have thrown a spell over this poor man, which he cannot get rid of. Judge — Attend, witness ; you are now to answer the ques- tions put to you. You need not spell that word any more. Mr. Dauncey. — When were you a gardener? Witness — I never was. The witness then stated that he never employed himself in gardening ; he first was a farmer, his father was a farmer, he (witness) ceased to be a farmer fifteen or sixteen years ago ; he ceased "because he had been learnt that business which he now is." "Whom did you learn it of?" "Is that a proper question, my lord?" "I see no objection to it." "Then I will answer it; I learnt of Doctor Hulme, my brother-in-law ; he practised the same as the Whitworth doc- tors, and they were regular physicians." Mr. Dauncey — Where did they take their degrees? Witness — I don't believe they ever took a degree. "Then they were regular physicians?" "No! I believe they were not; they were only doctors." "Only doctors! Were they doctors in law, physic, or divinity ?" "They doc- tored cows, and other things, and humans as well." "Doubtless, as ivell; and you, I doubt not, have doctored brute animals as well as human creatures?" "I have." Said the Judge to Witness, "Did you ever make up any medicine by the prescription of a physician?" "I never did." "Do you understand the characters they use for ounces, scruples, and drachms?" "I do not." "Then you cannot make up their prescriptions from reading them?" "I cannot ; but I can make up as good medicines in my way, as they can in theirs." "What proportion does an ounce bear to a pound?" {A pause.) "There are sixteen ounces to the pound ; but we do not go by any regular weight ; we mix ours by the hand." "Do you bleed ?" "Yes." "With a fleam or with a lancet?" "With a lancet." "Do you bleed from the vein or from the artery?" "From the vein." "There is an artery somewhere about the temples; what is 194 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL the name of that artery?" "I do not pretend to have so much learning as some have." "Can you tell me the name of that artery ?" "I do not know which you mean." "Sup- pose, then, I was to direct you to bleed my servant or my horse (which God forbid) in a vein, say for instance in the jugular vein, where should you bleed him?" "In the neck, to be sure." Judge — I would take everything as favorably for the young man as I properly can ; but here we have ignorance greater, perhaps, than ever appeared in a court before, as the only medium of education which this defendant can pos- sibly have received in his profession. Several other witnesses were examined for the defense. Judge Garrow, in summing up, observed that this was a question of considerable importance to the defendant in the cause, on whose future prospects it must necessarily have great influence ; and it was of the last importance to the public. The learned judge commented strongly on the ig- norance of the defendant's father, a man more ignorant than the most ignorant that they had ever before heard examined in any court. Was this man qualified for professing any science, particularly one in which the health and even the lives of the public were involved? Yet through such an impure medium alone had the defendant received his knowl- edge of this profession. There was not the least proof of the defendant's having for a single minute been in a situa- tion to receive instruction from any one really acting as an apothecary. If the ]\.\Ty thought that the defendant had acted as an apothecary before the time mentioned in the act, they would find a verdict for him ; but otherwise, they would find for the plaintiflFs in one penalty. The jury almost instantly returned a verdict for the plaintiflfs. OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE AND MEDICINE BY I. ARTHUR KING OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE AND MEDICINE m N the beautiful fiction of the Greeks, ^sculapius, the tutelary god of medicine, was the son of Apol- lo, the tutelary god of poetry and culture, and as far back as the memory of man can travel have the two deities walked, with Mercy in their train, their gracious way together. Cruel and capricious is our sov- ereign mistress Fortune, harsh and very arbitrary it would seem are the other divinities that shape our ends, but these two beneficent powers have never failed to bless and shelter us. Between the forces that envy and dissolve — ever mili- tant against our peace and joy — have Apollo and his son stood before us in the gap. One welcomed us into the world, and the other makes the world lovely to us, wrapping us in his glory and life and light, while he may. But when we wax faint and weary, as we must, then is Apollo's true son at our side soothing, encouraging, sympathizing; and even when the Fates have worked their wills upon the shattered frame, and we are passing beyond the reach of healing hands down the dark lonely road, he removes what obstacles he can, and smooths, loyal to the last, the stormy passage to the grave. Nor have the servants of these kindred deities been unmindful of the ties which connect them, and the rela- tion between Medicine and Literature forms one of the most interesting episodes in the history of Letters. They are not perhaps so intimately related now as they once were. We have many men distinguished, both in Medicine and Sur- gery, but we shall not be guilty of disrespect to the faculty if we say that very few manage to temper the severer pur- suits of science with the graceful accomplishments of the scholar. In an age like the present, when there is so much technical knowledge to be mastered, and when it must be difficult for a hard-worked practitioner to keep pace with 198 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL the ever-increasing discoveries which are every day throwing light on his own pursuits, it can hardly be expected that he should find time to sacrifice in any way to the Muses. Still, considering how closely associated the medical profession has been with literature, as well by its original contributions as by its affectionate intercourse with men of genius, one cannot help feeling a sort of regret at this compulsory es- trangement, and indulging a hope that some day or other the two pursuits may resume their old intimacy. And now, reader, with your leave, we will devote a few pages to the Literature of Physic, and recall the names of some of those who divided their impartial sacrifices between Delos and Epidaurus. Porson used to say that there was no better reading than the works of the Greek physicians ; and if he would have con- sented to exclude Galen and Paulus yEgineta, we should be disposed to cordially agree with him. Hippocrates and Are- taeus may be perused and reperused with delight by any one who has any interest in morbid pathology and its delineation. The first, who was a contemporary of Pericles, and who flourished therefore when style and literary skill had reached their climax of perfection, has left a large mass of writings behind him. It is not always easy to discriminate between his spurious and genuine offspring, it is true, and he has doubtless been made responsible for much that he never wrote. But the "Aphorisms" are certainly his, and if they contain much that will amuse, they contain much useful instruction. There is nothing sounder or weightier in all literature than the first : "Life is short, and the art is long, the occasion fleeting, experience fallacious, and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the at- tendants and externals co-operate." His treatise "On the Prognostics," a masterpiece of minute and vigorous descrip- tive power, contains a passage which recalls with sad exact- ness a scene witnessed by too many of us. "When in acute fevers, pneumonia, phrenitis, or headache, the hands are waved before the face, hunting through empty space, as if IN OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE 199 gathering bits of straw, picking the nap from the coverlet, or tearing chaff from the wall, all such symptoms are bad and deadly." A keen, curious, and close observer ; a shrewd, sagacious, and practical man ; a thoughtful and philosophic student of human nature ; a master of terse and lucid speech was this, the father of medicine. If he is to be numbered among the ornaments of his profession, he merits a place among the ornaments of prose literature. Aretaeus, too, is another medical writer whose literary excellence takes him out of the narrower sphere of a merely technical exponent of his art. This master of graphic composition flourished in the second century. He wrote, like Hippocrates, in Ionic Greek. He was evidently a man who combined as thorough a knowledge of his profession as was then pos- sible, with a liberal love for poetry and the belles-lettres. A humane and tender-hearted man, he often pauses to lament the helplessness of the surgeon when confronted with some forms of suffering, and to express his sympathy with the agonies he is unable to relieve. As a delineator of disease he has never been equaled, except perhaps by Sydenham, and his account of tetanus (Acute Diseases, Book I.), of elephantiasis (Chronic Diseases, Book II.), and of phthisis (Chronic Diseases, Book I.) rank among the miracles of verbal delineation. They are not merely triumphs of techni" cal diagnosis ; they are pictures which haunt the imagination like a nightmare ; they can never be forgotten. With the slow and painful elaboration of Balzac, Aretseus has all his potency in general effect ; he not only brings the sufferer be- fore our eyes, but he makes us feel and hear and almost share his tortures — his despair — his degradation — every detail of them. We close his book with horror and boundless admira- tion. As it is no part of this paper to deal with the history of medicine, we shall merely say of the illustrious Cornelius Celsus, that in purity and elegance of style he need fear no comparison with any of his contemporaries, though Livy and Nepos were probably among them. To Asclepiades, whose charms as a man and whose eloquence as a writer have been celebrated by Cicero, we can only allude. Of the writings 200 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL of Antonius Musa, the physician of Augustus, Maecenas, Virgil, and Horace, nothing has come down to us, but as long as Time shall be will his name belong to literature. For he, it was well known, was described by the grateful Virgil, in the twelfth book of the yEneid, under the name of lapis. Aetius, Oribasius, Alexander Trallianus, and others over whom we may not linger will bring us to times compara- tively modern. First among the moderns will stand the accomplished and versatile Jerome Fracastoro. Born in 1483, he was preserved to the world by a miracle, for when he was still an infant his mother was struck dead by a flash of lightning, while he, nestling in her bosom, escaped unscathed. His Latin poetry was the glory of an age which could boast of the composition of Politian and Bembo, and to the sedulous and successful cultivation of the fine arts he added an intimate ac- quaintance with astronomy and mathematics, while at the same time he was the most eminent physician in Italy. For many years statues of him towered up in the public squares of Padua and Verona, "that they might serve as a continual memento of him, and as an incentive to the pursuit of lit- erary eminence." Nor must we pass by Jerome Cardan, the daring enthusiast "who cast the horoscope of our Saviour, and subjected Him to the stars, to whom all stars are sub- ject." In his restless and indefatigable life there was scarce- ly a department of human knowledge into which he did not force himself. He was, he says, born to release the world from the manifold errors under which it groaned, and ten folio volumes testify his energy and ambition. The labors of fanatics are heavily discounted by time, but mathematics will forever be Cardan's debtor. Physical science will thank him for removing, if he did not correct, many errors, and the student of human nature must be sincerely grateful for the most curious and extraordinary autobiography in ex- istence. In Julius Caesar Scaliger medicine may boast one of its brightest scholastic ornaments, though, curiously enough, he began the study of neither medicine nor Greek till he was forty. Crudity and vigor characterize both the man and his IN OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE 201 writings, as his son's account of him and his own "Poetics" amply prove ; but the whole history of letters has no such portentous phenomenon to show as the catalogue of the works produced by this man between the age of forty — when, racked with gout, he began the Greek alphabet — and seventy-four, when he succumbed to his cruel foe. Five years before him died another physician, the immortal Fran- cois Rabelais. Rabelais's translations from Hippocrates and Galen have long sunk below soundings. He wrote them to get a practise which never came. One is not altogether sur- prised at his contemporaries' hesitating about entrusting their lives to the actual or potential author of "The Lives, Heroic Deeds, and Sayings of Gargantua and Pantagruel." He was never a good hand at patching up a farce, and was, with all his boisterous merriment, glad enough when his own was played out. Light lie the earth on Francois Rabelais, for light and merry has he made her children ! Crossing over to England, we are confronted with another son of ^sculapius, whose name can never be mentioned without pride by his countrymen — Dr. Thomas Linacre, the pupil of Politian and Chalcondylas, the friend of Erasmus, More, and Colet, the first teacher of Greek at Oxford, the initiator of the Renaissance in England. His enlightened and active mind seems to have traversed the whole range of human learning. He gave us our first correct version from Aristotle and Galen, he busied himself with divinity and philology, he translated Proclus on the Sphere, and in pure and perspicuous Latinity he treated of medicine and physi- cal science in works which are still consulted by the curious. His amiable temper, his tmostentatious charities, and his generous philanthropy have elicited glowing eulogies from more than one of his illustrious contemporaries. His tomb may still be seen in St. Paul's Cathedral, erected by another scholar for whom Medicine need never blush — Dr. John Caius. Contemporary with these great men was Sir Thomas Elyot, a physician of whom Literature may be justly proud. His "Castle of Health" was the first popular book on Medi- cine in our language, his "Bibliotheca Eliota" our first good / ao2 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL dictionary, and his "Governour," a sort of moral and ethical treatise, may still be read with interest. The faculty were, it seems, very angry with Elyot for divulging their Secrets and for vulgarizing medicine by writing about it in English. To which he manfully replied that it was no more shame for a person of quality to be the author of a book on the science of physic than it was for King Henry VI IL to publish a book on the science of grammar, which he had lately done. He was an intimate friend of Sir Thomas More^ and was one of the most accomplished scholars in Europe. We should like to say a word about Dr. Thomas Phair, the trans- lator of Virgil, and one of the authors of "The Mirrour for Magistrates" ; about William Bulleyn and his "Bulwark of Defence, &c." ; about Dr. William Cunningham and his "Whetstone of Wit" and "Castle of Knowledge" ; and about Reginald Scot and his curious "Discoverie of Witchcraft," but space forbids. As we propose to take the poets together, we shall, for the present, pass on to the great name of Thomas Sydenham. It is, perhaps, a little singular that, with the exception of Sydenham, no English physician has published a work on his own art which is entitled to a place among classical compositions, and which may be read with interest by the non-professional student. Sydenham's treat- ises, however, like those of Hippocrates and Aretseus, may be perused with delight by every intelligent scholar. Their facile, copious, and masculine Latinity, their graphic pictures of disease, the striking reflections which relieve the course of the technical narrative, their autobiographical interest, must come home to every one. In him were revived the literary graces which make the works of the great Cappadocian and Celsus so fascinating and delightful to the general reader. With him, however, perished the art : no other medical works have been prevented by their style from being altogether forgotten by literature in being superseded in science. But if ever Apollo and the Muses cared for mortal bant- ling, mild was their glance on the cradle of another future physician, who first saw the light in Cheapside, about the middle of October, 1605, for then came there into a world, IN OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE 203 which was to be so beautiful to him, Sir Thomas Browne. How shall we deal with him — how describe him — ^him, the author of the "Religio Medici," the "Hydriotaphia," the "Vulgar Errors," the "Quincunx," the charming "Letters"? Quaintest and best of moralists, truest, deepest, sincerest of philosophers, a Plato without his sophistry, a Seneca without his tinsel. Shall we call him, in Southey's measured phrase, "the greatest prose poet in this or in any other lan- guage," or echo Lamb's loving eulogies, or Coleridge's rap- turous praise, or Lytton's eloquent panegyric? Shall we enlarge on his boundless learning, as curious and recondite as Burton's, on his originality in treating even commonplaces as rich and racy as Montaigne's, on his aphorisms as piercing and pithy as Tacitus's and Bacon's, on his majestic elo- quence, soaring as high as Plato's or Jeremy Taylor's when their wing is strongest ? This, all this, will his lovers claim for him, but deeper still lies the subtle charm of his genius. The man, says Goethe, is always greater than his works, and never did literary expression less reflect the breathing soul than in Browne's style. Not a thought that weighs like lead on the solitary thinker but weighed heavily on him, and cruel were the agonies he struggled through ; he has told us all about them in that strange diction of his, with the garru- lous simplicity of a child, but he conquered, he says, on his knees. He might "count the world not an inn^ but an hos- pital, not a place to live but to die in," but he learnt to "re- turn to his Creator the duty of a devout and learned admira- tion." In the active practise of his profession he saw, as a philosopher, much of human weakness, as a physician much of human suffering ; but the duties of the physician he tem- pered with the liberal sympathies of a Christian philosopher. With his hand on the patient's pulse — they are his own words — he could not help thinking of his soul, and "forgot his province." At the age of seventy-seven, leaving pos- terity the precious legacy of his writings, he ceased to be mortal, "ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever and as content with six feet as with the moles of Adrianus." We have other names to mention, but Browne was the 204 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL prince of literary physicians. In striking contrast to him stands Bernard Mandeville, who scandalized the hypocrites of the eighteenth century by his paradoxical work entitled "The Fable of the Bees." He is not read now so much as he used to be, but in nervous vigor, irony, logic, and satire he is not unworthy of comparison with his brother cynic, Swift. His opinion of his fellow-creatures is not encourag- ing ; perhaps his professional experiences furnished him with the hint for his great doctrine, that private vices are public benefits. The treatises of Dr. Charleton — we beg his pardon for not mentioning him before — are now chiefly remembered from Dryden's allusion to one of them, though his "Brief Discourses Concerning the Different Arts of Men" has pointed many a paragraph in modern social essays, for which the judicious plagiarist has had the credit. Never did a more accomplished or more lovable man pen a prescription than the once famous Dr. Samuel Garth, the friend of Dry- den, Pope, and Steele, the noble philanthropist, who, when at the top of his profession, "practised among the poor for nothing," the scholarly translator of Ovid, the ingenious author of one of the best mock heroic poems in Europe, the poet who passed the heroic couplet perfect into the hands of Pope. Alas for human fame, who now turns over the deserted pages of "The Dispensary"? and yet it contains lines which would do credit to the highest names in liter- ature. But Garth was not the first poet-physiciaru That honor must be claimed by Dr. Andrew Borde, whose dismal lucu- brations lulled the ears of the good people in Henry VHI.'s reign. His "Breviary of Health" is not exhilarating, yet he could tell a good tale as well as any one, and he has the doubtful honor of being the Christian name of the original of the term "Merry Andrew," as another physician, Para- celsus, has furnished us with the term bombast. Over Dr. Thomas Lodge we must pause for a moment. His "Fig for Momus" is one of the earliest series of satires in our Ian- IN OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE 205 guage; some of his lyrics are divine (turn, reader, to his stanzas on "Beauty" and to "Rosalynde's Madrigal"), and his pretty prose-tale "Rosalynde ; or, Euphue's Golden Leg- acy," had the honor of furnishing Shakespeare with the plot of "As You Like It." One would like to have known some- thing, by the way, of Shakespeare's son-in-law, Dr. Hall, for if he wrote the epitaphs attributed to him in Stratford Church he must have been a man of no ordinary accom- plishments. Nor must we pass unnoticed that indefatigable physician, Philemon Holland, who though no poet himself was the cause of poetry in others. This unwearied scholar was not only a practising physician, but a schoolmaster as well, and managed in the intervals of his double vocation to present the world with complete versions of "Livy/' Pliny's "Natural History," Plutarch's "Morals," Suetonius's "Lives of the Caesars," Ammianus Marcellinus, Xenophon's "Cyropsedia," and Camden's "Britannia," with other works beside. He died, in his prime so to speak, aged eighty-six, having never had occasion to wear spectacles, and meditat- ing other translations. Truly they were giants in those days ; if Hygeia hid her secrets, she revealed her presence. Per- haps the faculty have no great reason to be proud of the irrepressible Sir Richard Blackmore, who, undismayed by the savage onslaughts first of Dryden and subsequently of Pope, complacently produced poems as fast as the world forgot them. His "Prince Arthur," his "Alfred," and his "Eliza" were given up even by his admirers, but his "Cre- ation," considered by Dennis superior to the "De Rerum Natura," was described by Addison as one of the most useful and noble productions in our English verse, and has elicited a warm eulogy from Dr. Johnson. Let those read it who can. Most of poor Blackmore's lucubrations, as he loved to call them, were written in his coach while he was hurry- ing from patient to patient — or, as Pope maliciously puts it, "written to the rumbling of his chariot wheels." What Blackmore was in verse that was Sir John Hill in prose. To us this unwearied scribbler — who among other ao6 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL things had tried his hand at writing farces — is best known by Garrick's epigram: For physic and farces his equal there scarce is, For his farces are physic, his physic a farce is. Yet he began well with a translation of Theophrastus's "Treatise on Gems," and his "Vegetable System," in twen- ty-six folios, representing no less than twenty-six thousand figures of plants drawn from nature, deserves the gratitude of botanists. His squabbles with the Royal Society, with Fielding, Smart, and others, amused the literary world of London for many years. Poor Christopher Smart gave it him well in a satire (the "Hilliad")* which is still worth reading, and from which Disraeli gives some amusing ex- tracts. Essays, farces, novels, epigrams, libels, disserta- tions, learned treatises, scurrilous pamphlets, letters, and even sermons flowed in unbroken succession from Hill's facile pen, and a catalogue of his writings would be the catalogue of no inconsiderable library. His proper place, however, was and now is with his brother quack who dis- graced another profession — Orator Henley, It is a relief to turn to Dr. Arbuthnot, of whose splendid genius and sweet temper Swift, niggard in praise though he was, could say to Pope, "He has more wit than we all have, and his humanity is equal to his wit." Those who can relish polished satire, delicate and exquisite humor, will turn again and again to the shabby old volumes, guiltless as yet of reprint, which contain "The History of John Bull," "The Treatise Concerning the Altercation or Scolding of the Ancients," and "The Art of Political Lying." There probably never existed an author more careless about liter- ary distinction ; Pope and Swift had during his lifetime, and * Describing him in these complimentary lines : On mere privation she (Nature) bestow'd a frame, And dignified a nothing with a name, A wretch devoid of use, of sense, of grace. The insolvent tenant of encumber'd space 1 IN OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE 207 have had ever since, the credit of having produced much of Arbuthnot's best and most characteristic work. We are for instance as confident that Arbuthnot wrote the introduction and opening chapters of Martinus Scriblerus as if we had seen the letters wet from his pen. There is no mistaking his touch, and yet every one goes on assigning those masterly pages to Swift or Pope. As a man this humorist-physician seems to have approached perfection as nearly as was ever permitted to our erring race. Well might the arch cynic exclaim when Arbuthnot's placid and benevolent figure, no- ble heart, and guileless life came up before his memory, "If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my 'Gulliver's Travels.' " There was another future physician, "whose humanity was equal to his wit," romping along Irish lanes when Arbuthnot was passing to his rest down the dark road which he had brightened for so many — for was not Oliver Goldsmith an M. D.? But whither are we straying? Cow- ley's slighted ghost whispers that he too— "the darling of Dryden's youth"— the Pindar of England, "the lord of the metaphysical school," the most fascinating of English essay- ists, was one of the faculty. He did not get much prac- tise, we are told : he probably preferred the fields of Chert- sey and the pleasant rooms of the Royal Society — where he could pick up the Reverend Mr. Sprat for an evening's carouse — to the sick-chamber and the querulous patient. Lovers of Italian poetry will not forget to couple with Cow- ley Francis Redi, whose "Bacco in Toscana" is one of the most delightful "Pindarics" in the world. He was for many years Court physician to Ferdinand II. and Cosmo III. Returning now to the eighteenth century, we must not omit Dr. Mark Akenside, the author of "The Pleasures of Imagination," a poem which must always rank among the gems of didactic poetry— a haughty and scholarly soul, one of the few poets of the eighteenth century who had drunk deep at Greek fountains. Had he not frittered away his genius in writing tame lyrics, and had he devoted him- self to satire, he might have rivaled the masterpieces of 208 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL Juvenal and Dryden ; so thought Macaulay, and so will think every one who turns to the picture of Pulteney, man- gled and battered in the ruthless couplets of "Curio." Akenside's blank verse is charming, and we shall have to go back to the Elizabethan masters to find anything so plastic, so richly cadenced, so variously harmonious. His "Inscriptions" and his "Hymn to the Naiades" are more thoroughly Hellenic than anything English literature had to show since Milton. We wonder they are not selected for translations at the universities. He appears to have been more successful as a poet than as a medical practi- tioner, and one of the retorts he got from a recalcitrant patient is worth recording. "Doctor," said the wag, "after all your remarks, my opinion of your profession is this : the ancients endeavored to make it a science and failed, and the moderns to make it a trade and succeeded." Smol- lett ungratefully introduced him in "Peregrine Pickle" as Dr. Smelfungus. Contemporary with Akenside, and intimately acquainted with him, was Dr. Armstrong, whose taciturnity has been immortalized by Thomson, whose surliness and cynicism seem to have furnished Abernethy with a model, and whose genius is evinced in "The Art of Preserving Health." He began his career with "The Economy of Love," a poem which speaks more for his honesty than for his tact and delicacy. Besides his chef-d'ceiwre just alluded to — a poem which in spite of its prolixity abounds in really eloquent passages — he produced a volume of essays, a number of medical treatises, and several miscellaneous pieces. He fa- vored the public also with some verses which he was pleased to call "Imitations of Shakespeare." Next on our list stands Dr. James Grainger, whose ode on "Solitude," praised so highly by Johnson, who paid the author the high compliment of repeating "with great ener- gy" the exordium, was also one of the favorite poems of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His didactic poem, "The Sugar Cane," has gone the way of his friend Smart's "Hop Gar- den." It is a curious monument of the misplaced ingenuity IN OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE 209 of the eighteenth century. Addison observes of Virgil that he tosses about his manure with an air of majesty, and poor Grainger's attempts to be majestic over receipts for a compost of weeds, mould, and stale, and over the symp- toms and cure of the yaws, his bathetic line, "Now, Muse, let's sing of rats," was too much for the gravity of a polite circle at Sir Joshua Reynolds's who had been assembled to hear the poet read his manuscript. His description^ how- ever, of a hurricane and earthquake, and his episodic tale of Junio and Theana, have been justly commended by Chal- mers, but "The Sugar Cane" has, we fear, sunk below extracts. His version of Tibullus is sometimes happy, though what poetical powers he had were probably quenched by hack-work and profession-struggles. He died at St. Christopher's in December, 1767. In Tobias Smol- lett medicine must recognize one of its brightest literary ornaments, and his admirers are not likely to complain of the neglect of their favorite, though since Dickens made his appearance it may be questioned whether there is any one who could, like Person, repeat whole scenes from his novels. Dickens's more refined humor has spoiled us for the coarser and more homely work of the Scotch surgeon, yet is the day far distant when Strap, and Pipes, and Com- modore Trunnion, and Bowling, and Lismahago, and Mathew Bramble shall cease to charm. What wondrous vitality this man must have had, what hardships he strug- gled through, proudly and silently. No wonder he wagged a bitter tongue, and wielded an irritable and caustic pen. He knew men far too well to respect them, though one could have wished that there had been a little more of the gener- ous tolerance, the higher tone, the nobler spirit of Henry Fielding, in his rough transcripts from life. There goes a story that he once went to visit his mother in disguise after a period of long absence, and that she recognized him by "his old roguish smile." It is this roguish smile that lights up every page of his writings, plays over all the sordid scenes and dismal holes in which his genius too often loves to ling^er. He died world-worn, exhausted, at Leghorn in 210 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL 1781, aged only fifty-one. Could he have held out for a year or two longer he would have ended his toilsome days — and his arduous struggles with poverty — on a handsome estate in the enjoyment of a handsome competence. Six years before Smollett died there passed away an- other physician whose memory is still preserved at Cam- bridge by the medals given annually for Greek and Latin Odes and Epigrams; this was Sir William Browne. In all the annals of eccentricity it would be difficult to find his match. He was an excellent scholar, and is the author of numberless treatises on literary, political, and scientific subjects. When Foote introduced him on his "Devil Upon Two Sticks," and made him the laughing-stock of half London, instead of being offended the good doctor sent the cruel wag a card complimenting him on his successful cari- cature, but adding that, as he had forgotten his muflf, he took the liberty of sending him the very one he wore, to complete the resemblance. In his will, which was written in a medley of Greek, Latin, and English, his devotion to Horace is singularly illustrated. "On my coffin when in the grave I desire may be deposited in its leather-case my pock- et Elzevir Horace — Comes viae vitaeque dulcis et utilis, worn out with and by me." He used to say that he preferred St. Luke to all the Evangelists, because of the purity of his Greek, and he made no doubt that Dr. Freind was quite right when he asserted that this purity arose from the Apos- tle's professional familiarity with the writings of the Greek physician. Towards the end of the eighteenth century another phy- sician was beginning his literary career at Lichfield — Dr. Erasmus Darwin, once one of the most popular poets in England. In some respects a foolish and eccentric man, he yet managed to accomplish a good deal of solid work in the seventy years during which he wrote and practised. His "Botanic Garden" and "Loves of the Plants," his mis- cellaneous pieces, and his "Temple of Nature," are poems full of splendid and sonorous declamation^ and are perhaps the most successful attempts to embody the truths of sci- IN OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE 211 ence in verse which have ever been made in English. His high-flown and extravagant style was inimitably parodied by Canning and Frere in the "Loves of the Triangles," but it ought not to be forgotten that from this poet-doctor Campbell learned the principles of his versification. His great, his damning defect is his want of variety and repose. Like Claudian, he cloys by his monotonous sweetness; like Gibbon and Macaulay, he wearies by his unrelieved bril- liance. Nor must we forget Dr. John Moore — the father of the hero of Corunna. His voluminous works are now al- most forgotten — yet two of them at least scarcely deserve such a fate. In his "Zeluco" he illustrates with no common power the eternal truth that vice is but gilded woe, and that in spite of all appearances to the contrary the prosperity of the scoundrel is hollow and unreal ; in another novel, "Edward," he reverses the picture : they are both drawn from the life, and are the fruits, it is easy to see, of minute personal observation operating on exceptionally wide ex- perience. In John Leyden, another surgeon. Sir William Jones might have found a rival in Oriental lore^ and Eng- lish literature lost a graceful and accomplished poet. We have often thought that Sir Walter Scott's memoir of this young scholar — who died before his time at Batavia, in Java, August 28, 181 1 — is the most delightful of his mis- cellaneous works. Everybody knows the lines in "The Lord of the Isles," Quench'd is his lamp of varied lore, That loved the light of song to pour: A distant and a deadly shore Has Leyden's cold remains. Dr. Walcot, better known as Peter Pindar, very soon exchanged medicine for preaching, though he appears to have been equally unsuccessful in both. The doctor had a living presented to him in Jamaica, by his patron. Sir Will- iam Trelawny, but he soon "emptied the church." He used to give his congregation ten minutes, and when after that time no one appeared, he and his clerk would betake them- selves to the sea-shore to shoot ring-tailed pigeons. He lies 212 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL quiet enough now in St. Paul's, Covent Garden, but for many years he poured out series after series of libels and satires which have no parallel for venomous scurrility, coarse and boisterous humor, audacious invective, and man- ifold ability. They used to make poor George III. and all good Tories shake in their shoes. In striking contrast to this witty reprobate stand those respectable physicians — Mason Good, Beddoes, Currie, and Madden — who contrib- uted much interesting matter to miscellaneous literature. The first translated Lucretius into blank verse ; the second was the author of the once famous essay on Health ; the third was the first to introduce Robert Burns to the notice of the English public ; and the fourth wrote an interesting work on the "Infirmities of Men of Genius." Bonnel Thorn- ton, the translator of Plautus, and the author of some of the best papers in the Connoisseur, deserves notice, and so also does the learned and indefatigable Dr. Aikin. John Locke, Crabbe, and Keats prepared themselves for surgeons, and so consequently form links in the golden chain, and Lever and Samuel Warren also walked the hospitals. Nor must we forget that Sainte-Beuve, the prince of French critics, is also to be numbered among the votaries of Medicine. But there is another point at which the two professions touch, and this forms one of the most pleasing passages in the annals of literature ; we mean the relationship be- tween men of genius so often stricken with bodily ailments, and those whose care and duty it is "to stand between man and his doom." Who can forget Dryden's grateful ac- knowledgment of the services of Hobbes and Gibbons? or Cheselden's goodness to Pope? or Meade's to Gay? or Ar- buthnot's to every literary man with whom he came into contact. "There is no end of my kind treatment from the faculty," writes Pope, a few weeks before he died; "they are in general the most amiable companions, and the best friends as well as most learned men I know." Brocklesby's tender and devoted attention to Johnson and Burke was as honorable to the faculty as to literature. He even offered, in his noble admiration of Johnson, to take IN OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE ii^ his irritable patient into his own house ; and listen, reader, to Johnson's dignified compliment to medicine — was it not ample fee? — Whether what Temple says be true, that physicians have had more learning than the other faculties, I will not stay to inquire, but I believe every man has found in physicians great liberality and dignity of sentiment, very prompt effusion of beneficence, and wil- lingness to exert a lucrative art where there is no hope of lucre. Steele had many acquaintances, but he never had a truer friend than Samuel Garth, M. D. It was to his doctor friend that he dedicated "The Lover." What a beautiful and touching testimony is this to the humanity of the ac- complished physician: . . . . We forgive you that our mirth is often insipid to you, while you sit absent to what passes amongst us from your care of such as languish in sickness. We are sensible that their distresses, instead of being removed by company, return more strongly to your imagination by comparison of their condition to the jollities of health. The best friend poor Chatterton ever had was the kind Bristol surgeon. Dr. Cotton's "Visions" have dropt into oblivion, but Cowper's acknowledgment of his skill and care will give the physician of St. Albans his passport to im- mortality ; and as long as "Pendennis" shall be read, so long will the name of Dr. John EUiotson be deathless. MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES MEDICAL ACCURACY OF CHARLES DICKENS H OW true to nature, even to their most trivial de- tails, almost every character and every incident in the works of this great novelist really were, is best known to those whose tastes or whose duties led them to frequent the paths of life from which Dickens delighted to draw. But none, except medical men, can judge of the rare fidelity with which Dickens followed the great Mother through the devious paths of disease and death. In read- ing "Oliver Twist" and "Dombey and Son," or "The Chimes," or even "No Thoroughfare," the physician often felt tempted to say, "What a gain it would have been to physic if one so keen to observe and so facile to describe had devoted his powers to the medical art !" It must not be forgotten that his description of hectic (in "Oliver Twist") has found its way into more than one standard work in both medicine and surgery (Miller's "Principle of Surgery," second edition, p. 46 ; also Dr. Aikin's "Practise of Medi- cine," third edition, vol. i., p. iii; also several American and French books) ; that he anticipated the clinical re- searches of M. Dax, Broca, and Hughlings Jackson, on the connection of right hemiplegia with asphasia {vide "Dom- bey and Son," for the last illness of Mrs. Skewton) ; and that his descriptions of epilepsy in Walter Wilding, and of moral and mental insanity in characters too numerous to mention, show the hand of a master. It is feeble praise to add that he was always just, and generally generous to our profession. Even his descriptions of our Bob Sawyers, and their less reputable friends, always wanted the coarseness, and, let us add, the unreality, of Albert Smith's (yet Smith was a Middlesex student) ; so that we ourselves could well afiford to laugh with the man who sometimes laughed at us, but laughed only as one who loved us. British Medical Journal. OLD PHYSICIANS T IS difficult to understand why special physi- cians, such as Galen and Avicenna and Car- dan should have gained a vast repute, nay, a vaster repute, as successful physicians, than is ever gained in our time. Were their prescriptions to be now used, it is certain that far more patients would be killed by them than by disease ; yet there was a time when they were supposed, at least, to save life with marvelous success. Galen's principle is described in the following words : "Given a disease, determine its character as hot or cold, moist or dry, by an effort of imagination ; having done so, select a remedy which has been catalogued as pos- sessing opposite qualities." And here is one of his prescriptions: — "For example, under the head of 'dysentery,' he gives for indiscriminate selection, according to taste, nine recipes, most of which are incorporated in the formulae of Paulus ^gineta, of which the following are specimens : — 'Of the ashes of snails, p. iv. ; of galls, p. ii. ; of peper, p. i. Reduce to a fine pow- der, and sprinkle upon the condiments, or give to drink in water, or a white, watery wine.' " How was it that such principles and such remedies ever gained even the modest reputation of being better than nothing? Here again is a grand prescription of the Ara- bian school: — "One of the most favorite of their preparations, which went by the name of Theriacum, was composed of the fol- lowing substances: — Squills, hedychroum^ cinnamon, com- mon pepper, juice of poppies, dried roses, water-germander, rape seed, Illyrian iris, agaric, liquorice, opobalsam, myrrh, saflFron, ginger, rhaponticum, cinquefoil, calamint, hore- hound, stone-parsley, cassidony, costus, white and long- OLD PHYSICIANS 219 pepper, dittany, flowers of sweet rush, male frankincense, turpentine, mastich, black cassia, spikenard, flowers of po- ley, storax, parsley seed, seseli, shepherd's pouch, bishop's weed, germander, ground pine, juice of hypocistis, Indian leaf, Celtic nard, spignel, gentian, anise, fennel seed, Lem- nian earth, roasted chalcitis, amomum, sweet flag, balsa- mum. Pontic valerian, St. John's wort, acacia, gum, carda- mom, carrot seed, galbanum, sagapen, bitumen, oposonax, castor, centaury, clematis, Attic honey, and Falernian wine. Sixty-six ingredients composed this mixture, and with the exception of the last, we may safely affirm that the phy- sicians who prescribed it were entirely ignorant of the ef- fects of any one of them, either taken by those in health or given to the sick." J. Rutherford Russell, M. D. M THE DISCOVERY OF ANESTHESIA EANTIME, events were developing which led presently to a revelation of greater immediate im- portance to humanity than any other discovery that had come in the century, perhaps in any field of science whatever. This was the discovery of the pain-dispelling power of the vapor of sulphuric ether, in- haled by a patient undergoing a surgical operation. This discovery came solely out of America, and it stands curi- ously isolated, since apparently no minds in any other country were trending toward it even vaguely, Davy, in England, had indeed originated the method of medication by inhalation, and carried out some most interesting experi- ments fifty years earlier, and it was doubtless his experi- ments with nitrous oxide gas that gave the clew to one of the American investigators ; but this was the sole contri- bution of preceding generations to the subject, and since the beginning of the century, when Davy turned his atten- tion to other matters, no one had made the slightest ad- vance along the same line until an American dentist re- newed the investigation. Moreover, there had been noth- ing in Davy's experiments to lead any one to suspect the possibility that a surgical operation might be rendered painless in this way ; and, indeed, the surgeons of Europe had acknowledged with one accord that all hope of finding a means to secure this most desirable end must be utterly abandoned — that the surgeon's knife must ever remain a synonym for slow and indescribable torture. By odd coin- cidence it chanced that Sir Benjamin Brodie, the acknowl- edged leader of English surgeons, had publicly expressed this as his deliberate though regretted opinion at a time when the quest which he considered futile had already led to the most brilliant success in America, and while the an- DISCOVERY OF ANESTHESIA 221 nouncement of the discovery, which then had no transatlan- tic cable to convey it, was actually on its way to the Old World. The American dentist just referred to, who was, with one exception to be noted presently, the first man in the world to conceive that the administration of a definite drug might render a surgical operation painless, and to give the belief application, was Dr. Charles W. Wells, of Hartford, Conn. The drug with which he experimented was nitrous oxide ; the operation which he rendered painless was no more important than the extraction of a tooth — yet it suf- ficed to mark a principle ; the year of the experiment was 1844. The experiments of Dr. Wells, however, though im- portant, were not sufficiently demonstrative to bring the matter prominently to the attention of the medical world. The drug with which he experimented proved not always reliable, and he himself seems ultimately to have given the matter up, or at least to have relaxed his efforts. But meantime a friend, to whom he had communicated his be- lief and expectations, took the matter up, and with unremit- ting zeal carried forward experiments that were destined to lead to more tangible results. This friend was another dentist. Dr. William J. Morton, of Boston, then a young man, full of youthful energy and enthusiasm. He seems to have felt that the drug with which Wells had experi- mented was not the most practical one for the purpose, and so for several months he experimented with other allied drugs, until finally he hit upon sulphuric ether, and with this was able to make experiments upon animals, and then upon patients in the dental chair, that seemed to him abso- lutely demonstrative. Full of eager enthusiasm, and absolutely confident of his results, he at once went to Dr. J. C. Warren, one of the foremost surgeons of Boston, and asked permission to test his discovery decisively on one of the patients at the Boston Hospital during a severe operation. The request was granted; the test was made in September, 1846, in the 322 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL presence of several of the foremost surgeons of the city and a body of medical students. The patient slept quietly while the surgeon's knife was plied, and awoke to astonished comprehension that the ordeal was over. The impossible, the miraculous, had been accomplished. Henry Smith Williams. on's knife vv was over. ih. ..^.inplished. Henry Smith Williams. A NDRE W I 'ESA L / I'S THE "BLACK DEATH" IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY T HE Black Death reached England in August, 1348, appearing first in the county of Dorset, thence spreading through Devon and Somerset, to Bris- tol, Gloucester, Oxford, and London; in fact, through the whole country. It took three months to reach London. Few places are believed to have escaped, and only a tenth part of the inhabitants were thought to have remained alive. . . . The disease was so contagious, that not only by being with the sick, but by looking at them, one took it of another; so that people died without servants, and were buried without priests. The father did not visit his son, nor the son his father. Charity was dead, and hope extinguished. . . . The mortality was everywhere on a grand scale. Aleppo lost 500 a day, Gaza 22,000 in all, and Cairo 15,000; Genoa lost 40,000, Parma the same number, Naples 60,000, Siena 70,000; Rome an incalculable number ; Venice, out of a population of 200,000, lost 70,000, saw 90 patrician families extinguished, and its grand council of 1,250 reduced to 380. In Florence 100,000 perished between the months of March and July. In Eng- land, Hecker specifies Yarmouth, Norwich, Bristol, Oxford, Leicester, York, and London, as cities that suffered incredi- ble losses. In Yarmouth 7,052 died, in Norwich 51,100, in London 100,000. Cyprus lost almost all its inhabitants, and ships without crews were often seen in the Mediterranean, and afterwards in the North Sea, driving about, and spreading the plague wherever they went on shore. At Avignon the Pope found it necessary to consecrate the Rhone, that bodies might be thrown into the river without delay, as the churchyards would no longer hold them. William Augustus Guy, M. B. ROYAL DEATHS FROM SMALL-POX B Y way of impressing the ravages of small-pox in the pre-Jennerian period on people's minds in a manner more picturesque than that of ordinary statistics, Dr. John Gairdner selects the history of a few Royal Houses. Thus, of the descendants of Charles I. of Great Britain he finds that of his forty-two lineal descendants up to the date 1712, five were killed outright by small-pox ; vis., his son Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and his daughter Mary, wife of the Prince of Orange and mother of William HI.; and three of the children of James Hi; viz., Charles, Duke of Cambridge, in 1677; Mary, Queen of England, and wife of William HI., in 1694 ; and the Princess Maria Louisa, in April 1712. This does not include, of course, severe attacks not fatal, such as those from which both Queen Anne and William HL suffered. Of the immediate descendants of his contemporary, Louis XIV. of France (who himself survived a severe attack of small-pox), five also died of it in the interval between 171 1 and 1774; z'i"., his son Louis, the Dauphin of France, in April of 171 1 ; Louis, Duke of Burgundy^ son of the pre- ceding, and also Dauphin, and the Dauphiness, his wife, in 1712; their son, the Due de Bretagne, and Louis XV., the great grandson of Louis XIV. Among other royal deaths from small-pox in the same period were those of Joseph I., Emperor of Germany, in 171 1 ; Peter IL, Em- peror of Russia, in 1730; Henry, Prince of Prussia, 1767; Maximilian Joseph, Elector of Bavaria, December 30, 1777. British Medical Journal. EXTRAORDINARY SURGICAL OPERATIONS T was necessary that a dangerous and difficult operation for the stone should be performed on Louis XIV., and several men afflicted with the like disease were carried to the house of Louvois, the Minister, where the chief surgeon, Felix, operated upon them before Fagon, the physician of the King. Most of those operated on died; and that the King might know nothing of his dangerous condition, or of the means adopted to ensure certainty and safety in the cure, they were buried privately, and by night. The operation was performed successfully upon the King, but Felix was so much agi- tated that a nervous tremor settled upon him for life ; and in bleeding a friend on the day succeeding that upon which the King had been so happily cured, he disabled the pa- tient irreparably. When Felip de Utre went in search of the Omeguas from Venezuela, he was wounded by a spear just beneath the right arm. A Spaniard, who was ignorant of surgery, undertook to cure him, and De litre's coat of mail was placed upon an old Indian who was mounted on a horse; the amateur surgeon then drove a spear into the Indian's body, through the hole in the armor, and his body having been opened, the spear being still kept in the wound, it was discovered that the heart was uninjured; thus they assumed that De litre's wound was not mortal, and being treated as if the wound were an ordinary one, he recovered. When Henry II. of France was mortally wounded by a splinter from a spear, in tilting with Mont- gomerie, which entered his vizor and pierced his eye, the surgeons, for the purpose of discovering the probable injury done to the King, cut ofif the heads of four criminals, and thrust splinters into their eyes, as nearly at the same in- clination as the fatal one had entered that of the King. Ambrose Fare's "Strange Cure for a Cut-off Nose," 226 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL which we give in the words of his translator, Johnson, is very remarkable: — "There was a surgeon of Italy, of late years, which would restore the portion of the nose that was cut away thus: — He first scarified the callous edges of the maimed nose round about, as is usually done in the cure pf hare-lips ; he then made a gash or cavity in the muscle of the arm, which is called biceps, as large as the greatness of the portion of the nose which was cut away did re- quire ; and into that gash or cavity so made he would put that part of the nose so wounded, and bind the patient's head to his arm, as if it were to a post, so fast that it might remain firm, stable, and immovable, and not lean or bow any way ; and about forty days after, or at that time when he judged the flesh of the nose was perfectly agglutinated with the flesh of the arm, cleaving fast unto the nose, as was sufficient to supply the defect of that which was lost, and then he would m.ake it even, and bring it, as by licking, to the fashion and form of a nose, as near as art would permit ; and in the meanwhile he did feed his patient with panadoes, jellies, and all such things as were easy to be swallowed 5ind digested." Irish Quarterly Review. EARLY SURGEONS |HE clergy and the Jews were the leading men of the medical profession during the tenth and eleventh centuries. From 1131 down to 11 63, the popes took occasion to thunder against practising ecclesiastics. A chief justice, about the year 1223, recom- mended to the Bishop of Chichester one Master Thomas, an army surgeon, as one who knew how to cure wounds, a science particularly needed in the siege of castles. Barbers assisted in baths, shaved, and applied ointments. Henry V., at Agincourt, with 30,000 men, had one surgeon and fifteen assistants. During the reign of Henry VHI., there were twelve surgeons in London. In 15 12, physicians and sur- geons had to be approved of by the Bishop of London, or the Dean of St. Paul's. Females were everywhere to be met with practising the healing art. The tooth-drawer's, now the dentist's art, is not of recent date. Sir John Bla- grave, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, had all his teeth drawn, and afterwards had a set of ivory teeth in again. Otter, in Ben Jonson's "Silent Woman," says all her teeth were made in the Black Friars. Social History of the Southern Countries. REMARKABLE INSTANCES OF CONTAGION T HE following remarks are applicable chiefly to typhus fever and the plague. When patients are ill of typhus fever, there issue from their bodies certain poisonous effluvia, which, being diffused through the air, render the persons who are exposed to the breathing or contact of them liable to the same disease. These effluvia attach themselves to various substances, to clothes, to bedding, to furniture ; and such as receive the effluvia from these are in like manner generally infected with the same disease. Wool, cotton, and fur carry con- tagion to a great distance in a very concentrated state. In- stances have been known of persons being struck dead while opening a bale of cotton, which had come from a place in- fected with the plague. Dr. Parr of Exeter, relates: — "The last plague which infected the town in which we now write, arose from a traveller remarking to his companion, that in a former journey, he had the plague in a room where they sat. 'In that corner,' said he, 'was a cupboard, where the bandages were kept ; it is now plastered, but they are probably there still.' He took the poker, broke down the plaster, and found them. The disease was soon dissem- inated, and extensively fatal." From the above statements we see the necessity of thoroughly cleaning everything con- nected with the house, and the bed and body-clothes of patients who have fever, and of burning everything that cannot be completely cleansed ; and the indispensable neces- sity of quarantine laws, judiciously made, and rigorously enforced. These poisonous particles do not appear to be very widely diffused through the air, nor do they infect persons in an adjoining street, room, or house, unless they be exposed to the substances to which the effluvia adhere, or unless they INSTANCES OF CONTAGION 229 come too near to the patient himself. When one or more persons, ill of typhus fever, are kept in a small ill-aired apartment, when their clothes are not cleaned, and their dis- charges are not duly carried out, the poison acquires a most malignant virulence, and persons going near the apartment are almost sure to be infected. It would appear that a healthy person, confined in an ill-ventilated and unwhole- some apartment, generates a contagion of the most per- nicious kind, which may infect others, though he himself is not ill of the disease. This was remarkably shown at the Old Bailey in 1750, when a culprit in good health was brought out for trial, and the e'ffluvia from his body and clothes infected a number of persons in court — not fewer than forty. John Times, F. S. A. THE PLAGUE OF 1665, AT EYAM JYAM, a hamlet secluded among the hills of the Peak of Derbyshire, is about 150 miles from Lon- don, and had a population of 350 souls. Quite early in the month of September, when the plague was at its worst in London, there was sent from London to one George Vicars, a tailor, a box of clothes. He opened the box and hung the clothes to the fire, and while he watched them was suddenly seized with violent sickness and other alarming symptoms. On the second day he was worse, and he died on the following night, September 6. The dis- ease spread from this centre; by March i, 1666, it had de- stroyed 58 souls ; and by the beginning of June, yj, or more than one in five of the population. About the middle of June, the plague began to increase ; and then it was that Mrs. Mompesson, the rector's wife, implored her husband to remove, with herself and their two young children, from this doomed village. But he, alleging his duty to his suf- fering flock and his responsibility to his Maker, and point- ing out the stain which would rest on his memory did he desert his post in this hour of danger, determined to remain. He, on his part, tried to persuade his wife to take their children with her to some place of safety, till the plague should be stayed. But she declared that nothing should in- duce her to leave him alone amid such ravages of death. Her children, however, she would send away. It was at this time (about mid-June) that the inhabitants, wishing to fol- low the example of the few wealthy who had left early in the spring, and of a few others who had built huts for them- selves in the neighborhood, would have deserted the village en masse. But now Mompesson, with his own example and that of his wife to back him, pleaded so effectually the selfishness and the uselessness of such a course, the danger to the neighborhood, and the slight chance of profit to them- THE PLAGUE OF 1665 231 selves, that the inhabitants were induced to give up all thoughts of flight. Mompesson then concerted measures with the Earl of Devonshire, who remained at Chatsworth during the plague, and with his assistance established and carried out an efficient quarantine. A circle was drawn round the village at a distance of about half a mile, beyond which no inhabitant should pass, and to two or three chosen spots provisions were brought every morning by persons from the neighborhood, who immediately retired. Men ap- pointed by the rector fetched these provisions, and left the purchase-money for the few articles not given by the earl, in troughs of water. Towards the end of June, the plague began to rage even more fearfully. There were so many deaths that the passing bell was no longer rung, the church- yard was no longer used for interment, and the church door was closed. The rector read prayers and preached from an arch in an ivy-mantled rock, in a secluded dingle, to his people seated on the grass, at some distance from each other. All this time, though Mompesson had been visiting from house to house, he and his wife had escaped ; but on August 22, Mrs. Mompesson was seized, and three days after was at rest in the village churchyard. In this terrible month of August there were yy deaths out of a population of less than 200 remaining at the beginning of the month. At least two in every five must have died. The hot month of September proved less fatal, and on October 11 the plague, as if exhausted with excessive slaughter, held its hand. It had attacked "j^ families, and swept away 267 out of 350 inhabitants — say seven in nine. These are the figures taken from the parish register. Mompesson states the death as 259; it is likely, therefore, that eight died from causes other than plague. Mompesson, the hero of this sad tragedy, left Eyam in 1669, three years after the plague had ceased, for a living in Nottinghamshire^ where, so fearful were the people even then of the plague in which he had lived and worked so long, that he was obliged to live in a secluded hut till their fears had died away. William Augustus Guy, M. B. EPISODES OF THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON ONDON has frequently suffered from the ravages of pestilence, and thousands and tens of thousands of the inhabitants have been swept by its virulence into one common grave. But at no period of its history was the mortality so devastating as in the year 1665, the "last great visitation," as it is emphatically entitled by De Foe in his "Journal of the Plague Year." This work was originally published in 1722 : now, as De Foe was only two years of age when the great pestilence occurred, his "Jour- nal" was long considered as much a work of imagination as his "Robinson Crusoe" ; but there is abundant evidence of his having compiled the "Journal" from contemporary sources (as the Collection of all the Bills of Mortality for 1665, published as "London's Dreadful Visitation" ; the "Loimologia" of Dr. Hodges ; and "God's Terrible Voice in the City," by the Rev. Thomas Vincent, 1667) ; and many of the events which De Foe records derive collateral support from the respective Diaries of Pepys, Evelyn, and Lord Clarendon — works which were not published until very long after De Foe's decease, and the manuscripts of which he could never have perused. De Foe is believed to have been familiar with the manuscript account of the "Great Plague," formerly in the Sloane Collection, and now preserved in the British Museum, by William Boghurst, a medical practition- er. It is a thin quarto manuscript of 170 pages, from which only a few extracts have been published. Boghurst was an apothecary in St. Giles's-in-the-Fields ; and he states that he was the only person who had then (1666) written on the late plague from experience and observation. Rapin and Hume have recorded the event in little more than a single sentence ; but Dr. Lingard has grouped the details of De Foe's "Journal" into a terrific picture, which has been com- GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON 233 pared to the celebrated delineation of the Plague of Athens by Thucydides. The Great Plague was imported in December, 1664, by goods from Holland, where, in Amsterdam alone, 20,000 persons had been carried off by the same infection within a short time. The infected goods were opened at a house in St. Giles's parish, near the upper end of Drury Lane, wherein died four persons ; and the parish books record of this period the appointment of searchers, shutting up in- fected houses, and contributions by assessment and sub- scription. A Frenchman who lived near the infected house in Drury Lane removed into Bearbinder Lane (leading to St. Swithin's Lane), where he died, and thus spread the distemper in the city. Between December and the ensuing April, the deaths without the walls of the city greatly in- creased, and in May every street in St. Giles's was infected. In July, in August, and September, the deaths ranged from 1,000 to 7,000 per week; and 4,000 are stated to have died in one fatal night ! In the latter month fires were burnt in the streets three nights and days, "to purge and purify the air. The Court removed from Whitehall to Hampton Court, and thence to Salisbury and Oxford; and the Londoners, leaving their city, carried the infection into the country ; so that it spread, towards the end of this and the following year, over a great part of England. The plague gradually abated in the metropolis ; but it was not until November 20, 1666, that public thanksgivings were offered up to God for assuaging the pestilence in London, Westminster ; and with- in the bills of mortality there were reported dead of the plague in 1664-5, 68,596; probably less by one-third than the actual number. Among the plague medicines were pill rufus and Venice treacle. Another antidote was sack. Tobacco was used as a prophylactic ; and amulets were worn against infection. Among many touching episodes of the plague, is that of a blind Highland bagpiper, who, having fallen asleep upon the steps of St. Andrew's Church, Holborn Hill, was con- 234 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL veyed away in the dead cart; and but for the howling of his faithful dog, which waked him from his trance, he would have been buried as a corpse. Of the piper and his dog, a group was sculptured by Caius Gabriel Gibber. Another episode is that of a grocer in Wood Street, Gheapside, who shut himself up with his family, with a store of provisions, his only communication being by a wicket made in the door, and a rope and pulley to draw up or let anything down into the street; and thus they escaped infection. The master of the "Gock and Bottle" or "Cock" ale-house, in Fleet Street, near Temple Bar, in 1665, dismissed his servants, shut up his house, and retired into the country ; having advertised farthings belonging to the said house to be brought in ; and one of these farthings is to this day ex- hibited by the present landlord of the tavern. A cross was affixed by authorities to the door of the house where there was infection ; and in the Guildhall Library was, a few years since, found one of these "Plague Grosses." It was the ordinary size of a broadside, and bore a cross extending to the edges of the paper, on which were printed the words, "Lord have mercy upon us." In the four quar- ters formed by the limbs of the cross, were printed directions for managing the patient, regulations for visits, medicines, food, and water. This "cross," unfortunately, is not now to be found. Very stringent enactments were introduced by Jac. i. c. 31, a statute which made it capital felony for any person having an infectious sore upon him uncured, to go abroad and converse in company, after being commanded by proper authority to keep his house. The necessity, however, of any regulations adapted to an actual prevalence of this disease among us, have been long at an end ; no plague having, by the blessing of Providence, been known in this island for more than 180 years past; and the statute of James, after remaining for so long a period dormant, was, at length, in the first year of the reign of her present Majesty, repealed. Henry John Stephen. FOUR THIEVES' VINEGAR REPORT of the plague in 1760 having been circu- lated, Messrs. Chandler and Smith, apothecaries in Cheapside, had taken in a third partner (Mr. New- son), and while the report prevailed, these gentle- men availed themselves of the popular opinion, and placed in their windows a written notice of "Four Thieves' Vine- gar sold here." Mr. Ball, an old apothecary^ passing by, and observing this, went into the shop. "What!" said he, "and have you taken in another partner?" "No." "Oh, I beg your pardon," repHed Ball ; "I thought you had by the ticket in your window." William Wadd. ARABS AND THE PLAGUE- THE Arabs seldom employ medicine for the plague; but, though predestinarians, the common belief in Europe is erroneous that supposes they use no pre- cautionary measures. Burckhardt states that many of the townsmen fled from Medina to the Desert ; alleging as an excuse, that although the distemper was a messenger from heaven sent to call them to a better world, yet, being conscious of their unworthiness, and that they did not merit this special mark of grace, they thought it more advisable to decline it for the present, and make their escape from the town. The Sembawees have a superstitious custom of lead- ing a she-camel through the town, covered with feathers, balls, and all sorts of ornaments; after which it is slaugh- tered, and the flesh thrown to the dogs. By this process they hope to get rid of the malady at once, as they imagine that it has been concentrated in the body of the devoted animal. Andrew Crichton, History of Arabia. T CAPUCHIN RECIPE HE following curious recipe for the present health of the body and eternal salvation of the soul, is copied from a paper which was posted on a door leading to the physical room in a convent of Ca- puchin Friars at Messina : "Pro presenti corporis et ataernse animae salute." Recipe. Radicum fidei Florum spei Rosarum charitatis Liliorum puritatis Absynthi contritionis Violarum humilitatis Agarici satisfactionis Ana quantum potes : Misceantur omnia cum syrupe confessionis ; Terentur in mortario conscientiae ; Solvantur in aqua lachrimarum ; Coquantur in igne tribulationis ; et fiat potus. Recipe de hoc mane et sera. Stephen Collet. THE MANUFACTURE OF LOVE CHARMS THE manufacture of love charms and philters is a practise nearly as old as the race. The mediaeval astrologers found their principal revenue from the sale of charms, which were to attract different eyes to the owners of them, or bring back to its allegiance some errant heart. The male sex, when driven to entire despair by some heart-whole, flouting she, did not scruple to use the charm or the philter as a last resort ; but the gentler sex were the astrologers' better customers. Perhaps because men are naturally more given to vanity and more confident of their unaided charms, perhaps because immemorial cus- tom has decreed that woman must wait to be wooed, and forbids that she should put forth her powers of persuasion and eloquence ; at all events women are to this day the chief users of charms and secret devices for compassing their ends in matters of the heart. Here is a love charm which Is declared to be absolutely infallible and was recommended and manufactured for years, and in great numbers, by a very old New Orleans negress, who was a Voodou priestess and who was said to be more than a hundred years old. She was a native African and never learned to speak English very distinctly. She lived by telling fortunes, the sale of herbs and Voodou charms, and this love charm, which had a very high reputation for effi- ciency, not only among her own people, but among the Creoles as well. It was made by catching a small tree-toad, one of the sort that makes night resonant in those warm regions, and which is not very much larger than the first joint of a man's thumb, provided the man be a big one, but with a voice out of proportion to its size. Their backs are a smooth, delicate green in color, without speckles, and on the under side they are pure, silvery white. These little 338 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL noisy reptiles are very shy and difficult to catch, and it was always a mystery how this antique darky managed to secure them, as they generally prefer to sing from the upper branches of the largest trees. She did get them, however, and compassed their demise by the kindly barbaric device of driving a large pin through their heads. She then looked for an ant-hill — and in Louisiana the formicae are numerous and voracious — near where she buried her wretched little victim, whose bones were immediately picked and polished to snowy whiteness by the ants. In the course of a day or two the remains were disinterred and went through certain Voodou formularies — mysterious African words — and were passed through lire upon which salt was sprinkled. The charm was then ready for use, and the purchaser, who had paid $2.50 — all in silver half-dollars — for this treasure, was then required to wear it about her neck for seven nights in succession. She was then to lie in wait for the insensate wretch who had failed to properly appreciate her attractions and, unobserved, hook the little skeleton to the gentleman's coat by its sharp, white claws. He probably crushed it or dropped it very shortly after, but if it remained only a very few minutes, five or six at most, the charm was sure to work, so great were its mysterious powers. The ancient African managed to dispose of some forty or fifty of these charms every year, and she was wont solemnly to assert that out of several hundred cases in which the charm was used but seven had entirely failed, and in those cases because the charm had been applied in the dark of the moon, it being necessary that all love charms should have their use when the moon was waning. THE BENEFITS DERIVED FROM ALCHEMY HE pursuit of alchemy is at an end. Yet surely to alchemy this right is due — that it may truly be compared to the husbandman whereof ^sop makes the fable, that when he died, told his sons that he had left unto them a great mass of gold buried underground in his vineyard, but did not remember the particular place where it was hidden ; who when they had with spades turned up all the vineyard, gold indeed they found none ; but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of their vines, they had a great vintage the year fol- lowing ; so the painful search and stir of alchemists to make gold, hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as the use of man's life. Francis (Lord) Bacon. SURGEONS EXEMPT FROM SERVING ON JURIES |T is a vulgar error that surgeons are exempt from serving as jurymen because they are considered to be in too constant a habit of suppressing their softer feelings, from the nature of their occupa- tion, to be competent judges in particular cases. The following extract puts the matter in the true light: "In the same year (i. e., 1513) the corporation of Sur- geons, consisting of twelve (a number then, as it appears, thought equal to the care of the metropolis), petitioned Parliament to be exempted from bearing arms, or serving on juries and parish offices, and succeeded in their request." (Public Acts) — Andrews's History of England. WISEACRE— PHYSICIAN W ISEACRE, or rather wise-acher: There is so jocu- lar a derivation and explanation of this word, in Clef. Way. p. 84, that it deserves to be transcribed again, from the article Physician, which, he says, "does not derive a ^vo-is, natura"; which is too quaint a derivation, too much out of nature, for the simplicity of those ancient times, in which the word physician was used ; you have it in the very old French farce of Patelin; wys-ake (or phys-ache), signifying one skilled in aches, pains, and distempers ; but still it is Greek, from axq, dolor, pain ; so that physician is literally a wys-ake, or wise-acher, after all. — Lemon's Dictionary, 1783. SELLING ONE'S BODY HE following curious letter was found among the papers of Mr. Goldwyr, a surgeon of Salisbury: To Mr. Edward Goldwyr, at his House in the Close, of Salisbury: Sir: Being informed that you are the only surgeon in this city (or county) that anatomises men, and I being under the unhappy circumstance, and in a very mean condition, would gladly live as long as I can ; but, by all appearance, I am to be executed next March, having no friends on earth that will speak a word to save my life, nor send me a morsel of bread to keep life and soul together until that fatal day : so, if you will vouchsafe to come hither, I will gladly sell you my body (being whole and sound), to be ordered at your discretion ; knowing that it will rise again at the general resurrection, as well from your house as from the grave. Your answer, sir, will highly oblige. Yours, &c., James Brooke. FIsherton- Anger Gaol; Oct. 3d, 1736. SANCTORIUS AND HIS CHAIR ANCTORIUS is the Latinized form of the name of an eminent Italian physician, who was called in his own language Santorio. He was born in 1561, at Capo d'Istria, studied medicine and took his degree at Padua, and then settled at Venice as a practitioner, where he had considerable success. In 1611^ he was recalled to Padua, and appointed professor of the theory of medicine in that university. He then commenced a series of observa- tions on Insensible Perspiration, which have made his name known even among those who do not belong to the medical profession. "For the better carrying on the experiments," says Addison, in the Spectator, No. 25, "he contrived a cer- tain mathematical chair, which was so artificially hung upon springs that it would weigh anything as well as a pair of scales. By this means, he discovered how many ounces of his food passed by perspiration, what quantity of it was turned into nourishment, and how much went away by other channels and distributions of nature." His best known work contains the results of a long series of observa- tions made upon the weight of his own body, and the ex- ternal causes which induced its increase or diminution. He treats especially of insensible perspiration, on the due amount of which he makes health and disease depend. There is much curious and valuable matter in the work. He un- questionably conferred a benefit on medical science, by di- recting the observation of medical men to the functions of the skin ; but unfortunately the doctrines were extended much too far ; and coinciding with the mechanical principles which were coming into vogue after the discovery of the Circulation of the Blood, as well as with the chemical no- tions which were not yet exploded, they contributed to com- plete the establishment of the humoral pathology, under 242 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL the shackles of which the practise of medicine continued al- most to our own times. In another work, Sanctorius de- scribes an instrument he had invented for measuring the force of the pulse, and several new instruments of surgery. He was also the first physician who attempted to measure by the thermometer (then newly invented) the heat of the skin in different diseases, and at different periods of the same disease. John Times, F. S. A. 'THE CHARIOT OF ANTIMONY" \ASIL VALENTINE, who lived towards the end of the fifteenth century, published a singular work, which he called "Currus Triumphalis Antimenii." Valentine ranks among the first who introduced metallic preparations into medicine ; and is supposed to be the first that ever used the word antimony. In the above work, after setting forth the chemical preparations of that metal, he enumerates their medicinal effects. According to the prevailing custom of the age, he boasts of supernatural assistance ; and his work furnishes a good specimen of the controversial disputes between the chemical physicians, and those of the school of Galen ; the former being attached to active remedies, and the latter to more simple and inert remedies. Valentine's "Chariot of Antimony" opens with the most pious exhortations to prayer and contemplation, to charity and benevolence. But the author soon forgets him- self, and breaks out in this virulent invective : "Ye wretched and pitiful medicanters ; who, full of deceit, breathe out I know not what ! Thrasonick brags ! infamous men ! more mad than Bacchanalian fools ! who will neither learn, nor dirty your hands with coals ! You titular doctors, who write long scrolls of receipts ! You apothecaries, who with your decoctions, fill pots, no less than those in princes' courts, in which meat is boiled for the sustenance of some hundreds of men! You, I say, who have, hitherto, been blind, suffer a collyrium to be poured into your eyes, and permit me to anoint them with balsam, that this ignorance may fall from your sight, and that you may behold truth, as in a clear glass!" * * * "But," says Basil Valentine, after pro- ceeding in this strain for some length, "I will put an end to my discourse; lest my tears, which I can scarcely prevent continually falling from my eyes, should blot my writing; and whilst I deplore the blindness of the world, blemish the lamentation which I would publish to all men." John Times, F. S. A. s SCOTTISH CHARACTERISTICS TRANG mentions an anecdote of the eminent Dr. Freer, who, in the zeal and enthusiasm of his pro- fession, was often plunged into this entire obliv- iousness. Visiting a young woman, for whom he had the day before prescribed a large and severe blister for the breast, sitting down by her side, feeling the pulse with one hand, and holding his gold repeater in the other, he be- gan to put the never-varying primary inquiries : "How are ye to-day? Are ye any better or are ye any worse, or are ye in much the same way?" To which the young creature replied, "I canna weel say, sir." "I'm glad of it," said the- doctor, "I'm glad of it. Did the blister do?" exclaimed the physician. "Oh, yes, sir ; it rose very much indeed." "I'm glad of it, I'm glad of it," said the doctor. "Oh, yes ; and," continued the patient, evidently suffering very much from her exertion, "it gave me very much pain and great uneasi- ness." "I'm glad of it, I'm glad of it," continued the doc- tor, and hurried away delighted with the success of his pre- scription, but leaving the poor patient not a little surprised at the odd way in which he had expressed his sense of its success. Paxton Hood. ms "ARISTOPHANES OF MEDICINE" lOSEPH HYRTL was one of the most famous an- atomists and the most original teacher. Hyrtl was the last of the founders of the modern school of medicine at Vienna, and his lectures at the univer- sity drew students from every civilized country. He has been called "the most intellectual man in Austria," and it would certainly have been difficult, even in a country that produced a Sapphire, to find his equal. The debt which medicine owes him is simply immense. His works on de- scriptive and topographical anatomy were epoch-making, and they were written in a way — full of wit and humor — which make them almost as attractive for the layman as for the academician. His book, "Text Book of the Anatomy of Man," has passed through seventeen editions, and his "Text Book of Comparative Anatomy" through seven, and both have been translated into every modern tongue. It is owing to his investigations, too, that the Vienna Anatomical Mu- seum is to-day the most famous and complete of its kind in the world. Hyrtl was by birth a Hungarian and first saw the light in 1811, in Eisenstadt. He was not only a "medicine-man," dividing honors with Rokitansky, Oppolzer, Skoda, Schuh, and the other founders of the Vienna Medical School, but he had a remarkable general knowledge. He was a master of Latin, and not only wrote it, but spoke it without diffi- culty. The same was true of his knowledge of Greek and the Oriental tongues, and he had read the literature of every modern country in the original language. Translations he abhorred. In his works the influence of Oriental, Hebraic, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, English, and German writers on particular points are clearly traced. Nothnagl has rightly called the great teacher the "Aristophanes of Medicine." 246 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL No professor ever taught at Vienna who was more popular among the students. All begged that he conduct their final examinations, or at least that he be present to see that jus- tice was done. Although he disliked the lazy student with all his heart, he was always ready to help the industrious ones, and a candidate who "got the shivers" on examination could always look to him for aid and encouragement. On one occasion he was in the room when Professor Langer was conducting the examination of an aspirant for the medical degree. Langer handed the student a small bone, saying: "Mr. Candidate, here is a bone. Don't look at it ; but tell me from feeling it what kind of a bone it is ; whether it belonged to the left or right side of a body, and whether it was part of a man or woman." The poor student blushed from embarrassment. There was a large audience present, and he saw failure staring him in the face. He cast a helpless glance at Hrytl, who moved about restlessly in his chair for a moment and then sprang to his feet. "And tell me, Mr. Candidate," he cried out, the spirit of anger lighting up his large blue eyes, "after answering the ques- tions of my dear colleague, the name of the original pos- sessor of this bone, and where and in what street he lived." This unexpected outburst saved the day, but Professor Lan- ger ever after declined to conduct an examination when Hyrtl was present. In one of his introductory lectures, in a recent semester, he addressed his hearers as follows : "Gentlemen, you must get possession of skulls. It is impossible to study anatomy unless you have skulls. Each of you must find means, any means, to get a skull." On the following morning he en- tered his auditorium with a sorrowful face. "Gentlemen," he began, "I fear some of you have misunderstood me. You certainly have left no means untried to secure skulls. I noticed that my handsome collection was almost depleted this morning." The students had taken him at his word and induced the servants to divide out the skulls of Hyrtl, which formed one of the chief attractions to medical men in the famous teacher's house. ARISTOPHANES OF MEDICINE 247 A Hebrew aspirant for medical honors, named Jerusalem, was once among the candidates examined by Hyrtl. His relatives and friends crowded about the door, awaiting with impatience the end of the examination. At last the door opened, but instead of the candidate, Professor Hyrtl emerged from it. At the sight of the crowd, he raised his hands, and then, with all the seriousness of a Luther, broke out in the words of Jeremiah : "Weep, Israel, for Jerusalem has fallen." Hyrtl was a great friend of animals. Some years ago Professor Briicke began experiments of the loss of weight in case of starvation. He used for the purpose a lot of rab- bits. The animals were weighed every day, but to the as- tonishment and embarrassment of the professor, they showed a gain in avoirdupois every twenty-four hours. The ex- periments were worthless, of course, and it was sometime before Briicke learned that Hyrtl, seeing the rabbits, took pity on them and used to steal to the cage unobserved, feed them to their full, and then remove every trace of the food on the floor. Hyrtl left a large fortune, which is to go to the Perchtoldsdorf Orphan Asylum, his widow enjoying the use of it to her death. He had already improved the village and founded a school, an asylum for children, and an orphan asylurn in Moedlurg. Every year he gave a large amount of money to the poor of the village. Although he had been decorated with orders by almost every sovereign in Europe, he could never be persuaded to wear one. He dressed so shabbily that strangers in Perchtoldsdorf, meeting him in the streets, often gave him small pieces of money. These he always accepted, giving them away, of course, and, if possible, learned the names of givers to surprise them with some memento of their kindness. He judged people by these acts, I THE REAL SHERLOCK HOLMES T was my privilege to meet Dr. Joseph Bell at his handsome house in Melville Crescent, Edinburgh. Dr. Conan Doyle has made no secret of the fact that Dr. Bell is the original of his famous cre- ation, Sherlock Holmes. But Dr. Bell insists that "Doyle's the clever man. It's nothing to do with me." It was with the greatest difficulty in the world that Dr. Bell would sub- mit to be interviewed, even under the most solemn promise of brevity ; and at first I thought I should have to return with virgin notebook. But the doctor's hatred of publicity was outweighed by his abnormal development of cheery courtesy, and at length I was seated, pencil in hand, before the white-haired, keen-eyed, ruddy-faced man, with clean- shaven lips and chin, and black velvet dinner jacket, the acquaintance and friendship of whom inspired Dr. Doyle to write his fascinating series of stories. "Can you," I proceeded^ "tell me of any instances in which your powers of observation have been of service to the au- thorities in the tracing of crime?" "Well, for twenty years or more I have been engaged in the practise of medical jurisprudence on beh^xlf of the crown ; but there is little I can tell you about it. The only credit I can take to myself is that appertaining to the circumstance that I always impressed over and over again upon all my scholars — Conan Doyle among them — the vast importance of little distinctions, the endless significance of the trifles. The great majority of people, of incidents, and of cases resemble each other in the main and larger features. For instance, most men have apiece a head, two arms, a nose, a mouth, and a certain number of teeth. It is the little differences, in themselves trifles, such as the droop of the eyelid or what not; which differentiate men." THE REAL SHERLOCK HOLMES 249 "Will you give me an instance of the manner in which you note these all-important trifles?" "This one struck me as funny at the time. A man walked into the room where I was instructing the students, and his case seemed to be a very simple one. I was talking about what was wrong with him. 'Of course, gentlemen,' I hap- pened to say, 'he has been a soldier in a Highland regiment, and probably a bandsman.' I pointed out the swagger in his walk, suggestive of the piper; while his shortness told me that if he had been a soldier it was probably as a bandsman. In fact, he had the whole appearance of a man in one of the Highland regiments. The man turned out to be nothing but a shoemaker, and said he had never been in the army in his life. This was rather a floorer ; but being absolutely certain I was right, and seeing that something was up, I did a pretty cool thing. I told two of the strongest clerks, or dressers, to remove the man to a side room, and to detain him till I came. I went and had him stripped — and I daresay your own acuteness has told you the sequel." "You have given me credit for that which I don't possess, I assure you." "Why, under the left breast I instantly detected a little blue 'D' branded on his skin. He was a deserter. That was how they used to mark them in the Crimean days, and later, although it is not permitted now. Of course, the reason of his evasion was at once clear." "Did you have any prevision about the literary celebrity of Conan Doyle while he was yet your pupil ?" "I did not know he was coming out as a literary charac- ter, but I always regarded him as one of the best students I ever had. He was exceedingly interested always upon anything connected with diagnosis, and was never tired of trying to discover all those little details which one looks for. I recollect he was amused once when a patient walked in and sat down. 'Good morning, Pat,' I said, for it was impossible not to see that he was an Irishman. 'Good morn- ing, your honer,' replied the patient. 'Did you like your walk over the links to-day, as you came in from the south 250 DOCTORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL side of the town?' I asked. 'Yes,' said Pat; 'did your honor see me?' Well, Conan Doyle could not see how I knew that, absurdly simple as it was. On a showery day, such as that had been, the reddish clay at bare parts of the links adheres to a boot, and a tiny part is bound to remain. There is no such clay anywhere else round the town for miles. Well, that and one or two similar instances excited Doyle's keenest interest, and set him experimenting himself in the same direction — which, of course, was just what I wanted." "What is your exact connection with the crown ?" "I must explain that Dr. Littlejohn is the medical ad- viser, and he likes to have a second man with him. He is a very intimate friend of mine, and it so happens that for more than twenty years we have done a great deal together, and it has come to be the regular thing for him to take me into cases with him. But I have no official connection with the crown. With regard to the doctors, I think every good teacher, if he is to make his men good doctors, must get them to cultivate the habit of noticing the little apparent trifles. Any really good doctor ought to be able to tell, be- fore a patient has fairly sat down, a good deal of what is the matter with him or her. With a woman, especially, the observant doctor can often tell, by noticing her, exactly what part of her body she is going to talk about." "Have you had at all an eventful life yourself?" "No; I studied here in the university, took my degree at twenty-two, was for two years assistant demonstrator of anatomy in the Edinburgh university, signed as house sur- geon at the Royal infirmary of this city, and have been there ever since, having been senior surgeon for many years, and being now consulting surgeon. I should like to say this about my friend Doyle's stories, that I believe they have inculcated in the general public a new source of interest. They make many a fellow who has before felt very little interest in his life and daily surroundings think that, after all, there may be much more in life if he keeps his eyes THE REAL SHERLOCK HOLMES 251 Open than he had ever dreamed of in his philosophy. There is a problem, a whole game of chess, in many a little street incident or trifling occurrence, if one once learns the moves." The End. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. tf JUN'4 1967 f^c. lwhm%m-^m^'-r^,^.^'^.