SECRET REMEDIES.
Two centuries ago, and even later than this, it was not thought unprofessional for a physician to have secret remedies. Thus Dr. Goddard, who was much trusted by Oliver Cromwell, who was one of the original members of the Royal Society, professor at Gresham College, the friend of Sydenham, and a Fellow of the College in 1646, was the inventor of “Goddard’s drops.” The most notable instance of “professional secrets,” however, is that of the midwifery forceps. This was the secret of the Chamberlen family, of whom I will mention two. Peter Chamberlen (M.D. Padua, F.R.C.P. 1628) was probably the first fashionable obstetrician, and is supposed to have been the inventor of the forceps. He made an attempt to organise the monthly nurses, was much employed about the English court, and had eighteen children by his two wives. Hugh Chamberlen, the son of Hugh Chamberlen and the nephew of Peter Chamberlen (F.R.C.P. 1694), was the most celebrated man-midwife of his day. He published a translation of Mauriceau’s Midwifery, and in the preface to that book he says: “I will now take leave to offer an apology for not publishing the secret I mention we have to extract children without hooks where other artists use them; viz., there being my father and two brothers living that practise this art, I cannot esteem it my own to dispose of nor publish it without injury to them, and I think I have not been unserviceable to my own country, although I do but inform them that the forementioned three persons of our family and myself can serve them in these extremities with greater safety than others.” This is a very pretty specimen of medical ethics on the part of one who was a censor of the College as late as 1721. What are probably the original forceps were accidentally discovered, in 1815, at Woodham Mortimer Hall, Essex, formerly the residence of Peter Chamberlen. “They were found under a trap-door in the floor of the uppermost of a series of closets, built over the entrance porch,” and may now be seen in the library of the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society. Hugh Chamberlen is buried in Westminster Abbey, where a Latin epitaph of seventy-two lines, by Bishop Atterbury, adorns his tomb.
I feel tempted to mention two or three more of the early physicians who are deservedly famous, but in doing so I must limit myself to those who flourished mainly in the seventeenth century.
John Radcliffe, who became F.R.C.P. in 1687, appears to have been a blustering, kindly, and successful practitioner. He spoke his mind freely, even to monarchs, and seems to have made his way more by push than courtesy. His chief claim to be remembered is as a public benefactor. He accumulated a large fortune, and founded at Oxford the Radcliffe Library, Radcliffe Infirmary, Radcliffe Observatory, and Radcliffe Travelling Fellowship, and also left £500 a year to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, for improving the diets of the patients. Radcliffe was only one of many London doctors who have been great public benefactors. I have already alluded to Linacre, Caius, Harvey, Baldwin Hamey, Caldwell, and Croon, and the list may be enlarged by mentioning Sir Hans Sloane (who founded the British Museum and gave the Chelsea Garden to the Apothecaries’ Society), William and John Hunter, Erasmus Wilson, and Richard Quain—the last and the most munificent benefactor of this (University) College.
Sir Hans Sloane was born in 1660, became F.R.C.P. in 1687, was president from 1719 to 1735, and died in 1753 in his ninety-fourth year. He was president of the Royal Society from 1727 (succeeding Sir Isaac Newton), and retired to Chelsea in 1740, where his name still lives in Sloane Street and Hans Place. In his youth he accompanied the Duke of Albemarle to Jamaica, and returned home with a valuable botanical collection. He was a great accumulator of archæological and natural curiosities, and his collection was by his will offered to the nation at a nominal sum, and thus was founded the British Museum. Sir Hans Sloane was born in the last days of the Commonwealth, only three years after the death of Harvey. In Evelyn’s Diary we read how, on April 16th, 1691, he (Evelyn) “went to see Dr. Sloane’s curiosities, being an universal collection of the natural productions of Jamaica,” &c. He lived in the reign of Charles II., James II., Anne, William III., George I., and George II., and died five years after the birth of Jeremy Bentham, who was so active in the foundation of University College.