AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE EMPEROR TO MAKE USE OF HIS ENGLISH.—ON MEDICINE.—CORVISART.—DEFINITION.—ON THE PLAGUE.—MEDICAL PRACTICE IN BABYLON.
8th.—The Emperor had had no sleep during the night; he had, therefore, amused himself with writing me another letter in English; he sent it to me sealed; I corrected the errors in it, and sent him an answer also in English, by the return of the courier. He understood me perfectly: this convinced him of the progress he had made, and satisfied him that for the future he could, strictly speaking, correspond in his new tongue.
For nearly a fortnight past, General Gourgaud had been unwell; his indisposition had turned to a very malignant dysentery, which occasioned some alarm. The Admiral now sent him the Surgeon of the Northumberland (Dr. Warden); the Emperor detained this gentleman to dinner. During the repast, and for a long time afterwards, the conversation was exclusively on medicine; sometimes lively, sometimes serious and profound. The Emperor was in good spirits: he talked with great volubility; he overwhelmed the Doctor with questions, and with ingenious and subtle arguments, that perplexed him much: the latter was much dazzled by this brilliancy; so that, after dinner, he took me aside to ask me how it happened that the Emperor was so well informed on these matters: he did not doubt but they were his usual topics of conversation. “Not more than any thing else,” I said, with truth; “but there are few subjects with which the Emperor is unacquainted, and he treats them all in a new and engaging manner.”
The Emperor has no faith in medicine, or its remedies, of which he makes no use. “Doctor,” said he, “our body is a machine for the purpose of life: it is organized to that end—that is its nature. Leave the life there at its ease, let it take care of itself, it will do better than if you paralyze it by loading it with medicines. It is like a well-made watch, destined to go for a certain time; the watch-maker has not the power of opening it, he cannot meddle with it but at random, and with his eyes bandaged. For one who, by dint of racking it with his ill-formed instruments, succeeds in doing it any good, how many blockheads destroy it altogether!”
The Emperor, then, did not admit the utility of medicine but in a few cases, in disorders that were known and distinctly ascertained by time and experience: and he then compared the art of the physician with that of the engineer in regular sieges, where the maxims of Vauban, and the rules of experience, have brought all the chances within the scope of known laws. In accordance, too, with these principles, the Emperor had conceived the idea of a law which should have allowed to the mass of medical practitioners in France the use of simple medicines only, and forbidden them to employ heroic remedies, that is, such as may cause death, unless they made three or four thousand francs, at least, by their profession; which, said he, afforded grounds for supposing them to have education, judgment, and a certain public reputation. “This measure,” said he, “was certainly just and beneficent; but in my circumstances it was unseasonable: information was not yet sufficiently diffused. No doubt the mass of the people would have seen only an act of tyranny in the law, which, nevertheless, would have rescued them from their executioners.”
The Emperor had frequently attacked the celebrated Corvisart, his physician, upon the subject of medicine. The latter, waving the honour of the profession and of his colleagues, confessed that he entertained nearly the same opinions, and even acted upon them. He was a great enemy to medicines, and employed them very sparingly: the Empress Maria-Louisa, suffering much during her pregnancy, and teazing him for relief, he artfully gave her some pills composed of crumb of bread, which she observed did her a great deal of good.
The Emperor said he had brought Corvisart to admit that medicine was a resource available only for the few; that it might be of some benefit to the rich, but that it was the scourge of the poor. “Now, do you not believe,” said the Emperor, “seeing the uncertainty of the art itself, and the ignorance of those who practise it, that its effects, taken in the aggregate, are more fatal than useful to the people?” Corvisart assented without hesitation. “But have you never killed any body yourself?” continued the Emperor, “that is to say, have not some patients died evidently in consequence of your prescriptions?”—“Undoubtedly,” replied Corvisart; “but I ought no more to let that weigh upon my conscience than would your Majesty, if you had caused the destruction of some troops, not from having made a bad movement, but because their march was impeded by a ditch or a precipice, which it was impossible for you to be aware of.”
Thence the Emperor went on to some problems and definitions, which he proposed to the Doctor. “What is life?” said he to him; “when and how do we receive it? Is that any thing but mystery yet?” Then he defined harmless madness to be a chasm or incoherence of judgment between just ideas and the application of them: an insane man eats grapes in a vineyard that is not his own; and, in reply to the expostulations of the owner says:—“Here are two of us; the sun sees both of us; therefore I have a right to eat the grapes.” The dangerous madman was he in whom this chasm or incoherence of judgment occurred between ideas and actions: it was he who cut off the head of a sleeping man, and concealed himself behind a hedge, to enjoy the perplexity of the dead body when it should awake.
The Emperor next asked the Doctor what was the difference between sleep and death; and answered the question himself by saying that sleep was the momentary suspension of the faculties within the power of our volition; and death the lasting suspension, not only of these faculties, but also of those over which our will has no control.
From that, the conversation turned upon the plague. The Emperor maintained that it was taken by inspiration as well as by contact: he said that it was rendered most dangerous and most extensively propagated, by fear: its principal seat was in the imagination. In Egypt, all those in whom that (the imagination) was affected, perished. The most prudent remedy was moral courage. He had touched with impunity, he said, some infected persons at Jaffa, and had saved many lives by deceiving the soldiers, during two months, as to the nature of the disease: it was not the plague, they were told, but a fever accompanied with ulcers. Moreover, he had observed that the best means to preserve the army from it were to keep them on the march, and give them, plenty of exercise: fatigue, and the employment of the mind upon other subjects, were found the surest protection.[[32]]
The Emperor also said to the Doctor—“If Hippocrates were on a sudden to enter your hospital, would he not be much astonished? would he adopt your maxims and your methods? would he not find fault with you? On your part should you understand his language? should you at all comprehend each other?”—He concluded by pleasantly extolling the practice of medicine in Babylon, where the patients were exposed at the door, and the relations, sitting near them, stopped the passengers to enquire if they had ever been afflicted in a similar way, and what had cured them. One had at least the certainty, said he, of escaping all those whose remedies had killed them.
9th.—I was breakfasting with the Emperor, after our English lesson, when I received a letter from my wife that filled me with joy and gratitude. She said, that neither fear, fatigue, nor distance, could prevent her joining me; that, separated from me, she could experience no happiness, and that she was only waiting for the proper season. Admirable devotion! superior to all that we have manifested here, inasmuch as it is exerted with a perfect knowledge of all its consequences. I cannot think that in England they will have the cruelty to refuse her: what does she solicit? favours, interest? No; she begs to share the lot of an exile on a solitary rock; to fulfil a duty, and to testify her affection!—How far was I from forming a just estimate of the hearts and minds of those who detained us! Madame de Las Cases found herself constantly repulsed: sometimes under various pretexts; sometimes even without an answer. At last, and as if to rid himself of her importunity, Lord Bathurst caused her to be informed, in the beginning of 1817, that she should be permitted to go to the Cape of Good Hope (500 leagues beyond St. Helena), whence “if the Governor of St. Helena (Sir Hudson Lowe) sees no objection, she shall be allowed to join her husband.”
I leave, without comment, this specimen of ill-timed pleasantry to the consideration of any one who has the feelings of a man. This letter came by the Owen Glendower frigate, which arrived from the Cape, and brought us at the same time the European papers to December 4.