Once, before setting out on a journey, being incredulous as to the safety of cash-boxes and safes, he hid a considerable quantity of gold and notes in the fireplace of his study, covering them with cinders and shavings. A month after, returning luckily sooner than he was expected, he found his housemaid preparing to entertain a few friends at tea in her master's room. She was on the point of lighting the fire, and had just applied a candle to the doctor's notes, when he entered the room, seized a pail of water which happened to be standing near, and throwing its contents over the fuel and the servant, extinguished the fire and her presence of mind at the same time. Some of the notes were injured, and the Bank of England made some difficulty about cashing them.
'When doctors disagree,' etc. Do they ever agree? Yes, when, after a consultation over a mild case which has no interest for any of them, they over wine and biscuits agree that the treatment hitherto pursued had better be continued. To discuss it further would interrupt the pleasant chat over the news of the day! But when they meet over a friendly glass at the coffee-house they go at it hammer and tongs. Dr. Buchan, the author of 'Domestic Medicine,' of which 80,000 copies were sold during the author's lifetime, and which, according to modern medical opinion, killed more patients than that—doctors like cheap medicine as little as lawyers like cheap law—Dr. Gower, the urbane and skilled physician of Middlesex Hospital, and Dr. Fordyce, a fashionable physician, whose deep potations never affected him, used to meet at the Chapter Coffee-House, and hold discussions on medical topics; but they never agreed, and with boisterous laughter used to ridicule each other's theories. But they all agreed in considering the Chapter punch as a safe remedy for all ills.
Dr. Garth, the author of the 'Dispensary,' a poem directed against the Apothecaries and Anti-Dispensarians, a section of the College of Physicians, was very good-natured, but too fond of good living. One night, when he lingered over the bottle at the Kit-Kat Club, though patients were longing for him, Steele reproved him for his neglect of them. 'Well, it's no great matter at all,' replied Garth, pulling out a list of fifteen, 'for nine of them have such bad constitutions that not all the physicians in the world can save them, and the other six have such good constitutions that all the physicians in the world cannot kill them.' The doctor here plainly admitted the uselessness of his supposed science, as in his 'Dispensary' he admitted drugs to be not only useless, but murderous.
'High where the Fleet Ditch descends in sable streams,
To wash the sooty Naiads in the Thames,
There stands a structure[#] on a rising hill,
Where Tyros take their freedom out to kill.'
[#] Apothecaries' Hall. A doctor, I forget his name, having obtained some mark of distinction from the Company of Apothecaries, mentioned at a party that the glorious Company of Apothecaries had conferred much honour on him. 'But,' said a lady, 'what about the noble army of martyrs of patients?'
In Blenheim Street lived Joshua Brookes, the famous anatomist, whose lectures were attended by upwards of seven thousand pupils. His museum was almost a rival of that of John Hunter, and was liberally thrown open to visitors. One evening a coach drew up at his door, a heavy sack was taken out and deposited in the hall, and the servants, accustomed to such occurrences, since their master was in the habit of buying subjects, were about to carry it down the back-stairs into the dissecting-room, when a living subject thrust his head and neck out of one end and begged for his life. The servants in alarm ran to fetch pistols, but the subject continued to beg for mercy in such tones as to assure them they had nothing to fear from him. He had been drunk, and did not know how he got into the sack. Dr. Brookes ordered the sack to be tied loosely round his chin, and sent him in a coach to the watch-house. How he got into the sack may easily be surmised: Some body-snatchers, a tribe then very much to the fore, had no doubt found the man dead drunk in the street, and knowing the doctor to be a buyer of subjects, had taken him there, in the hope that the doctor might begin operating on the body before it recovered consciousness, so as to enable them afterwards to claim the price. In the days when there were dozens of executions in one morning at Newgate, the doctors had a good time of it, for the bodies of the malefactors were handed over to them for dissection. In fact, under the steps leading up to the front-door of Surgeons' Hall, a handsome building which stood next to Newgate Prison, there was a small door, through which the corpses were introduced into the building. Surgeons' Hall was pulled down in 1809, to make room for the new Sessions House.
The doctors of the previous two centuries were mostly Sangrados, who bled and purged their patients most unmercifully; but we must say this to their credit, they did not descend to the sublime atrocity of microbes, bacilli, and all the other horrors of the microscopic mania now sending unnumbered nervous people into lunatic asylums. And so they had not, like their modern compeers, the chance of amusing themselves and paying one another professional compliments by sending glass tubes, filled with the deadly spawn, from one country to another by ship and rail. Fancy one of those tubes getting accidentally broken, or being intentionally smashed for a lark on board a passenger steamer. Why, this would speedily become a vessel laden with corpses! At least, according to modern teaching, which, entre nous, we have no more faith in than we have in many other medical dicta. A man is ill from over gorging or drinking, a child ails from a surfeit of sweets or from catching a disease playing with other children in the streets or at school. The doctor is called in, and instead of telling the man, 'You have made a beast of yourself,' or correctly indicating the cause of the child's illness, he sniffs about and says: 'There is something the matter with your drains: I can smell sewer-gas.' And presently the sanitary inspector arrives, and orders the pulling up and renewal of the drains, and for days the house is filled with the effluvia supposed to be poisonous. How is it the whole family do not die off? Well, scavengers who daily deal with offal and garbage of the most offensive kind, the men who work down in the sewers, enjoy robust health; the latter only suffer when they are suddenly plunged into an excess of sewer-gas, but it is the quantity and not the quality that injures.
The excessive treacliness of modern doctors, as we have just shown, is as objectionable as was the brimstone treatment of some of their predecessors. A principle with modern doctors is never to acknowledge themselves nonplussed. The old doctors now and then confessed themselves beaten. Said an Æsculapius who had been called in to prescribe for a child, after diagnosing, as the ridiculous farce of tongue-speering and pulse-squeezing is called: 'This here babe has got a fever; now, I ain't posted up in fevers, but I will send her something that will throw her into fits, and I'm a stunner on fits.' And modern doctors, indeed, have no occasion to admit ignorance since the invention of the liver. When they cannot tell what is the matter with a man, or they are too urbane to reproach him with his excesses, his liver is out of order—and that is an organ which cannot possibly be examined and its condition be verified so as to prove or disprove the practitioner's assertion. I assume that nine out of ten people don't know where or what the liver is—I'm sure I don't, and don't want to; but as Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep, the doctors should bless their colleague who invented the liver! Abernethy, of whom more hereafter, with all his eccentricity, was honest enough to confess that he never cured or pretended to cure anyone, which only quacks did. He despised the humbug of the profession, and its arts to mislead and deceive patients. He only attempted to second Nature in her efforts. He admitted that he could not remove rheumatism, that opprobrium of the faculty, and no doctor can; a residence in a warm and ever sunny clime, or a long course of Turkish baths, can do it. Hence sings Allan Ramsay's 'Gentle Shepherd':
'I sits with my feet in a brook,
And if they ax me for why,
In spite of the physic I took,
It's rheumatiz kills me, says I.'[#]
[#] In searching for material for these pages I had occasion to read the lives of a good many doctors; half of them, I should say, died of rheumatism and gout.