III. ENGLAND, 1838-1844.
Returns to England, 1838—Alcock resumes professional work—Prize essays and publications—Sir James Paget's testimonial—A Commissioner for adjusting Peninsular claims—Appointed Inspector of Anatomy, 1842—Imperfections of the Anatomy Act—Marriage to Miss Bacon, 1841—His enforced abandonment of a surgical career.
On his return to England in 1838 Alcock at once resumed the work of his profession. In that year he published in a small 8vo volume 'Notes on the Medical History and Statistics of the British Legion of Spain'; and in 1839, and again in 1841, he carried off the Jacksonian prizes of the Royal College of Surgeons awarded for the best essays on subjects selected by the Council. The first of these was "On Concussion or Commotion of the Brain"; the second, "On Injuries of the Thorax and Operations on its Parietes"; and naturally the value of the papers lay in the extent to which the author was able to draw on his own observation and experience of gunshot wounds during his seven years of Peninsular service.
Of these contributions to medical literature Sir James Paget remarks that "they may make one regret that he was ever induced to give up the study of surgery. For they show an immense power of accurately observing and recording facts, and of testing his own and others' opinions by the help of all the knowledge of the facts possessed by others at that time.... I doubt whether in the first half of this century better essays on gunshot wounds of the head and of the thorax had been written."
And the small volume dealing with hospital experiences in Spain has drawn from the same eminent authority the comment that "it tells in a most graphic and clear manner the difficulties which, sixty years ago, beset the practice of surgery and the care of troops during war. These difficulties may have been greater at that time in Spain than in any other country in Western Europe, and may be thought now impossible, but they may be read with great interest, and one cannot doubt that Sir Rutherford Alcock's true account of them helped to remedy them, ... contributed to the improvement of the medical department of the army in this country."
Mr Alcock joined the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1839, and was appointed Lecturer in Surgery at Sydenham College, where he delivered a series of lectures on complicated injuries, amputations, &c.
His professional labours were soon diversified by an employment which could scarcely have been consistent with a large practice, though in the beginning of his surgical career it might not seem to involve much sacrifice except of time. But it was arduous, onerous, and absolutely gratuitous. Great trouble had arisen between the Spanish Government and the Foreign Legion in regard to pay. No settlement could be obtained, and eventually a commission was appointed to examine and adjudicate the numerous claims, to which commission Mr Alcock was appointed by express and unanimous request of the general and the field officers of the corps. His qualifications for such an office were quite exceptional, for to first-rate business capacity, which had been shown in the campaign, he added a knowledge of the language and the country which was not common, and a character which commanded universal confidence. His work on this commission extended over two years, and was brought to a satisfactory termination in 1839.
No sooner were the labours of the Spanish commission concluded than Mr Alcock was, in 1840, appointed by the Foreign Office to a similar duty in an Anglo-Portuguese commission constituted by the two Governments to adjust the claims of British subjects who had served in the Miguelite war of 1832-35. The work of that commission also was satisfactorily accomplished in 1844, and, as in the Spanish commission, Mr Alcock's labours were given without remuneration, in order, as he said, that his judgment might be unbiassed.[2]
During the course of the Spanish commission Mr Alcock was, in 1842, appointed, on the strong recommendation of Sir Benjamin Brodie, to a post under the Home Office, that of Inspector of Anatomy. It would be distasteful and of no utility to rake up the circumstances which set on foot an agitation culminating in the passing of an Act of Parliament in 1832 known as "The Anatomy Act." Like many other Acts of legislature in this country, it was a compromise by which difficulties were sought to be evaded by cunningly devised phrases whereby the thing that was meant was so disguised as to appear to be something else. "The Act failed in two most important points; it failed in honesty, and was wanting in the extent of the powers conferred." In short, after ten years' trial the Act was becoming unworkable, and a reform in its administration was imperatively demanded. It was at that critical moment that Mr Alcock was nominated as one of the two inspectors under the Act, and he entered on his duties with his well-proved practical energy. Before the end of the first year a long and interesting report was sent in by the inspectors, and we may judge by the sample of the Hospital Report in Oporto how thoroughly they exposed the difficulties and how practically they proposed to overcome them. A second report followed in 1843. But Government is a lumbering machine, always waiting for some stronger compulsion than a mere demonstration of what ought to be; and we are not surprised, therefore, to find fifteen years later, and fourteen after his connection with the Home Department had ceased, Mr Alcock still writing the most lucid and matter-of-fact memoranda on the conditions under which competent inspectors might be induced "to work a very imperfect Act of Parliament."
It was during the period under review that the most interesting episode in a young man's life occurred. On the 17th of May 1841, when he had just completed his thirty-second year, he was married to Miss Bacon, daughter of the sculptor of that name. The ceremony took place at St Margaret's, Westminster, Dean Milman, then a Canon of Westminster, officiating. His domestic bliss was unruffled, the couple being profoundly congenial.
But now "a change came o'er the spirit of his dream." The career which opened before the young surgeon was full of promise. So far as the personal factor was concerned, no man could have started with a better equipment. There were efficiency, thoroughness, enthusiasm, courage, and common-sense; there were, as we have seen in the student days, manual dexterity and exactness and artistic power of no contemptible order; there was, in short, every attribute of an accomplished surgeon, who must in the course of nature rise to eminence. A chair of military surgery was ready for him at King's College, and an assistant-surgeonship at Westminster Hospital. All that, however, had to be sacrificed and a new departure taken, in consequence of an illness which left its mark in the form of paralysis of hands and arms, and thus put an end to "all dreams of surgical practice."
This malady was a legacy from the Peninsula. Like Cæsar, "he had a fever when he was in Spain," a rheumatic fever of a particularly severe type contracted at the siege of San Sebastian. This entailed indescribable pain and misery during many months, and, in spite of partial recoveries, seems to have left its after-effects seven years later in what he calls the "mysterious" affection in his hands. It was indeed considered remarkable that he should have survived an attack of so formidable a character. He never recovered the use of his thumbs, which marred the legibility of his writing to the end of his life.
His professional career being thus rudely closed, it might well have appeared to a man of thirty-five that his life was shipwrecked ere the voyage was well begun. It would have been in accord with the short-sighted judgment which men usually form of their own fortunes. But
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will;"—
and Alcock learned, what many before and since have learned, that prosperity and adversity oft visit men in disguise, and are liable to be mistaken the one for the other. Providence employs for its favourites an alchemy whereby the very ashes of their misery may be transmuted into pure gold; and what looks like disaster is but the rending of the veil which concealed a world of richer promise than that which they abandon with regret.
CHAPTER II.
SENT TO CHINA.
Importance of appointment—New position created by Treaty of Nanking—Exceptional responsibility of the new consuls—The evolution and scope of foreign intercourse—Pioneer traders—Mutual experiences of Chinese and foreigners—Results—English inheritors of the record—An intolerable state of things—Drastic remedy—Where it failed—Chasm between Eastern and Western ideas—Commerce alone supplied a safe medium of intercourse—Its healing qualities—But social and political concomitants created friction—Arbitrary interferences of Chinese Government—Their traditional mode of treating barbarians—Denial of human rights—Absence of law in their intercourse—Spasmodic resistance to Chinese tyranny aggravated the evils—East India Company submitted for the sake of gain—Close of the Company's charter—Followed by endeavour of British Government to establish official intercourse—Determined resistance of Chinese—Lord Napier, first British envoy, not received—Loaded with insults—Contradictory instructions given by British Government—To conciliate Chinese as in days of Company, and at same time to open diplomatic relations—Lord Napier's appeal to experience—His death at Macao—Captain Ellis, a third envoy, reverts to the policy of submission—Has no success.
When thus thrown upon his beam-ends in 1844, an appointment was conferred on Mr Alcock which was not only honourable to him but creditable to the Government which selected him. He was among the five chosen to fill the office of consul in China under the treaty of Nanking, which had been concluded in 1842. And if any event in human life be deserving of such distinction, the opening thus provided for the talents of Mr Alcock is on many grounds entitled to rank as providential. To the end of his days he himself recognised that his previous training had not been thrown away, but "had been unconsciously preparing him for the great work of his life." The Minister responsible for the appointment may be excused if, while selecting a man of proved capacity for a post of unknown requirements, he did not realise the full value of the service he was rendering to his country. Governments are not always so perspicacious in gauging the merits of the uncovenanted, and other nominations made under circumstances not dissimilar have shown how easily the efficiency of the candidate may be subordinated to considerations extraneous to the public weal.
The China consulates were a new creation, a venture into the unknown, a voyage without landmarks or chart, where success depended on the personal qualities of the pioneer navigators—their judgment, resourcefulness, and faculty of initiative. Great issues hung upon the opening of the new world of the Far East, the success of which was largely in the hands of the agents who were employed, for they were practically beyond the reach of instructions. There was no telegraph, and the so-called Overland Route to India was just beginning to be exploited for the conveyance of mails and passengers. Nor was it possible for even the wisest Government to frame general instructions providing for eventualities out of the range of common experience. The conditions of service were therefore such as to constitute an ordeal under which a bureaucratic official would shrivel into uselessness or worse, while to a strong man they were a powerful stimulant, the very breath of life.
It was therefore a matter of serious consequence who should be intrusted with the actual inauguration of the new relations with China; and in the course of the present narrative it will probably appear that it was a happy accident by which the country lost one distinguished surgeon among many and gained in exchange a political representative whose services must be considered unique.