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.