DOCTORS READY DRESSED.
“These, Sir,
Are Death’s Masters of the Ceremonies;
More strangely-clad officials never yet
Usher’d the way to Death’s cold festival.”
Old Play.
Of all the doctors on the learned rota, there may have been more famous, but none more deserving, than Freake. He was regardless of nothing but dress; and he had a capital appreciation of fun, and a strong predilection for matters of fantasy.
Dr. Freake of St. Bartholomew’s, and his cousin the Justice, were not only given to dreaming, but to publish their dreams. They deemed their visions not only important to themselves and the public generally, but to the sovereigns of Europe especially. The dreams were wildly unintelligible, and the interpretations unintelligibly wild. But the Justice had active common-sense about him when he was awake. He was a careful dresser, which is more than can be said for the Doctor, and he presented the Bodleian Library with a collection of medals. Their tricksy spirits added the word freak to the vocabulary of the English language.
The Doctor’s cousin, like the Doctor, was not a fop; and as much could scarcely be said of the profession generally. Granger says indeed of Dr. Col that he was not a coxcomb. This was at a time when the physicians were coxcombs; and the apothecaries, who followed and copied the more dignified brethren, were coxcombs and meta-physicians. The medical coxcomb of the day has thus been dressed up by a popular poet:—
“Each son of Sol, to make him look more big,
Had on a large, grave, decent, three-tail’d wig;
His clothes full-trimm’d, with button-holes behind;
Stiff were the skirts with buckram stoutly lined;
The cloth, cut velvet, or more reverend black,
Full made, and powder’d, half-way down his back;
Large decent cuffs, which near the ground did reach,
With half-a-dozen buttons fix’d on each.
Grave were their faces, fix’d in solemn state!
These men struck awe, their presence carried weight;
In reverend wigs, old heads young shoulders bore,
And twenty-five or thirty seem’d threescore.”
Such was the learned and able individual by whose help we became the heirs of our forefathers,—helping the one into life, the other out of it. I will add a sketch of a German doctor, and then of a French doctor of some celebrity, both for his costume and his professional and personal qualities. And first, of the professional dress of the Medicus Germanicus.
Madame Schopenhauer says of the German doctors of the last century that they were all aged—not so much by weight of years as of preconceived opinions. She could not imagine that any of them had ever been young, or had ever condescended to the sports of the young. For many years of her life she never either saw or heard of a young physician. These vice-lords of human life, incomparably clever at guessing, were addressed by the style and title of “Excellency;” and even as Falstaff was “Jack Falstaff” only with his familiars, so he must have been a very intimate friend indeed who ventured to call a German physician “Herr Doctor.”
He who has seen Bundle in the ‘Waterman’ may have a very good idea of a German medico’s wig:—snow white, thickly powdered, and excruciatingly curled. It had further the distinction of resting, one portion on the back and two descending in front of the shoulders. A scarlet cloth coat adorned with gold lace, ruffles deeper plaited than Lord Ogilvie’s, a shirt-frill as wide as a mainsail, silk stockings, knee-breeches, and an acre of buckles on the shoes enriched with gold and gems, a low-crowned cocked hat under the arm, too small for the head, and a stout walking-stick or fancy cane, with clouded or carved head-pieces,—and ever applied to prop the chin in cases where it was necessary to let it be thought that the physician was thinking,—it was thus attired that these patented murderers went forth to slay. What should we think now of Dr. Locock in a gold-laced scarlet coat, like Lablache in ‘Dulcamara’?
The ‘Connoisseur,’ speaking of the medical dress in England, says:—“When we see a snuff-coloured suit of ditto, with bolus-buttons, a metal-headed cane, and an enormous bushy grizzle, we as readily know the wearer to be a dispenser of life and death, as if we had seen him pounding a mortar or⸺, etc.”
In France, the medical costume of the last century and of the preceding one was quite as singular. At an earlier period the dress of the “mire,” that primitive healer of the people, was a familiar sight to the Parisians, especially in the neighbourhood of the Rue de la Harpe. A long black robe covered the dirt, and stood for dignity in this once remarkable personage, who traversed the streets, vending dreadful unctions. He was always escorted by a boy bearing a monkey, and this monkey was bled a dozen times a day by the learned gentleman, to satisfy the passers-by that he, the professor, and not the monkey, was a skilful hand at phlebotomy.
In a street adjacent to the Rue de la Harpe resided, during a portion of the troubled reign of Louis XVI., the celebrated Dr. Audry. He had lived there for twenty years without being able to achieve any of the renown which he subsequently acquired. He had fallen in love, but that did not help him. He lacked one indispensable thing, wanting which nobody trusted him. He wore no wig. He had a magnificent head of hair of his own; but to retain that was only wearing a testimonial of incapacity. The fair lady, who was his heart’s familiar friend, resided in a house opposite his own; and when she heard that her Samson was about to be shorn, she burst into tears, and reproached him with infidelity. “Such splendid curls!” sobbed the damsel.
“My colleagues do not wear them!” said Audry.
“You in a peruke!” exclaimed the lady, hardly knowing whether to laugh or to cry at the idea of her lover in a wig.
“It is the symbol and livery of science. Without it, it appears, I cannot be a doctor.”
The lady insisted, by way of compromise, that she should be permitted to select the wig; and she expressly made choice of one of such colossal dimensions and of so easy a fit, that poor Audry looked more like a fool than a physician in it. But it helped to bring him into fashion. He was considered as an old gentleman; and young ladies admitted him to their circles and causeries, from which they affected to banish youth of aspect less mature. His popularity was on the increase, just as an adventure happened to him, which might have shaken a reputation more firmly established.
He was one evening summoned to attend a wealthy English Peer, whose mansion was in the Rue Tournon. His way thither led him beneath the window of his fair friend, who had been rather piqued by his success among the ladies, and who had previously resolved to overthrow both cause and effect connected therewith. She was a pretty, sparkling, and joyously mischievous girl of some three-and-twenty years; and her father loved her nearly as much as he did fishing, which, for an enthusiastic angler as he was, was no small proof of paternal affection. The damsel contrived so well that, as the doctor passed, she flung her line, with the paternal fish-hook at the end of it, and caught up the wig therewith as lightly as her father would have picked up a trout.
Dr. Audry looked up in astonishment, and prayed for his professional peruke in vain. Being hurried, moreover, he passed on his way, and repaired to his patient with a head like Mr. Buckstone’s in Scrub.
When Lord A⸺ beheld him he exclaimed, “What! waited upon by the assistant, when I sent for the principal?—by a student, when I needed a practitioner?—but perhaps you are Doctor Audry’s nephew:—well, my groom has the same sort of rheumatism that I have; be kind enough to go and look after him.”
Audry, in his memoirs, in telling the tale, does not forget the sequel. Thus insulted, he rushed, in a rage, to the offending lady, who met him with open arms and laughing eyes. “My dear doctor,” said she, “do not storm; Papa was just on the point of securing to you something better than a peruke,—a fortune!”
“You are a light—”
“Thing to be loved, as you love me: I know it,” said the lady archly, “but St. Severin is our parish nevertheless.”
“St. Severin our parish? I do not comprehend; unless I am authorized to go there and arrange for our marriage.”
“Take all that papa prescribes upon that head; and, talking of heads, you shall have your peruke again after the honeymoon.” Audry was content; and the wedding went off as merrily as though it had been the last act in an old comedy; though the newly-espoused couple did not lead quite so angelical a life afterwards, as either St. Severin of Cologne, or his namesake of Bordeaux. But it was neither to be expected nor required of them. They would not have been half as profitable to the state if they had followed, throughout, the example set them by the saint whose name graced the church wherein they were united.
A Dacota doctor is perhaps, neither in costume nor practice, more absurd than his European brethren of the early part of the last century. His fee is a blanket, a buffalo robe, or a pipe; his dress is chiefly composed of the first two articles; and his cunning lies in his sacred rattle, which he shakes as Christian doctors do their heads, and there is no doubt as much in one as in the other. Wherever he goes he carries with him his medicine-bag; and to ask him what that mysterious article contains, and upon what grounds he applies its contents, would be an insult as profound as if you asked your own medical man for the reasons of his practice, and expected that he would (or could) give you an answer. The Winnebagoes are attired like their learned brethren among the Dacotas; but dress is not thought so much of by them as possession of the medicine-bag: to lose this is to lose reputation. But, savages as these are, they have some very wise observances. The chief of these is the medicine-dance. This is a grand solemnity, given by the doctors, for two reasons: one, for the increase of practice, just as we find the fashion to be at home; the other reason is, in order to appease the dead who have died under medical treatment. And perhaps that is also the reason why our own medicine-men give such neat dinners, such splendid balls, or such enjoyable quadrilles on the carpet and soirées dansantes. These entertainments are born of remorse; and when next you join the saltatory throng at the house of your medical friend, ponder gravely, good reader, on the solemnity of the occasion, and impress upon that fair girl, with her hair à l’Impératrice, that the object for which you mutually point the light fantastic toe, is to rescue the medical master of the house from the revengeful visits of the unskilfully slain at his hands. That understood, plunge with frantic velocity into the valse à deux temps. The sacred rattles of the Dacotas and Winnebagoes are always shaken with maddening rapidity on these occasions, and you are the rattles by which doctors live. The more you are shaken, the better they live; and should you have the honour of perishing by their prescription, find comfort in knowing that other waltzers will perform, not in your memory, but that you may be peacefully forgotten, the “medicine-dance” of the medically murdered.
It will be found only another division of this subject to treat of odd dressers and dresses, after touching upon doctors and costume,—doctors who so often looked like the Laird of Cockpen, of whom we are told that
“His wig was well powther’d and as good as new,
His jacket was red, and his hose they were blue;
He put on a ring, a sword, and cock’d hat;
Ah, who could refuse the Laird wi’ a’ that?”
If the doctors were sometimes queerly costumed, their matches might be occasionally found among the laity. For these I open the last scene, and “Enter mob variously attired.”