In an English school the influence of the master is, of course, more constant, because one of the masters is always within call, while in Germany he is visible during school-hours only. If a master is fond of his pupils, and takes an interest in them individually, he can do them more good than parents at home, or the teacher at a day school. The boys at a German school are, no doubt, a very mixed crew, but that cannot be helped. This mixture of classes may be a drawback in some respects, but from an educational point of view the sons of very rich parents are by no means more valuable than the poor boys. Far from it. Many of the evils of schoolboy life come from the sons of the rich, while the sons of poor parents are generally well behaved. But for all that, there was a rough and rude tone among some of the boys at school, arising from defects in the education at home, and this sometimes embittered what ought to be the happiest time of life, particularly in the case of delicate boys. The son of a Minister has often to sit by the side of the son of a wealthy butcher, and the very fact that he is the son of a gentleman often exposes the more refined boy to the bullying of his muscular neighbour. I was fortunate at school. I could hold my own with the boys, and as to the masters, several of them had known my father or had been his pupils, and they took a personal interest in me.
I remember more particularly one young master who was very kind to me, and took me home for private lessons and for giving me some good advice. There was something sad and very attractive about him, and I found out afterwards that he knew that he was dying of consumption, and that besides that he was liable to be prosecuted for political liberalism, which at that time was almost like high treason. I believe he was actually condemned and sent to prison like many others, and he died soon after I had left Dessau. His name was Dr. Hönicke, and he was the first to try to impress on me that I ought to show myself worthy of my father, an idea which had never entered my mind before, nay, which at first I could hardly understand, but which, nevertheless, slumbered on in my mind till years afterwards it was called out and became a strong influence for the whole of my life. I still have some lines which he wrote for my album. They were the well-known lines from Horace, which, at the time, I had great difficulty in construing, but which have remained graven in my memory ever since:
“Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis,
Est in iuvencis est in equis patrum
Virtus nec imbellem feroces
Progenerant aquilae columbam.
Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam,
Rectique cultus pectora roborant;
Utcunque defecere mores,
Dedecorant bene nata culpae.”
In my childhood I had to pass through the ordinary illnesses, but it was the faith in our doctor that always saved me. The doctor was to my mind the man who was called in to make me well again, and while my mother was agitated about her only son, I never dreamt of any danger. The very idea of death never came near me till my grandfather died (1835), but even then I was only about twelve years old, and though I had seen much of him, particularly during the years that my mother lived again in his house, yet he was too old to take much share in his grandchildren’s amusements. He left a gap, no doubt, in our life, but that gap was filled again with new figures in the life of a boy of twelve. He was only sixty-one years old when he died, and yet my idea of him was always that of a very old man. Everything was done for him, his servant dressed him every morning, he was lifted into his carriage and out of it, and he certainly lived the life of an invalid, such as I should not consent to own to at seventy-six. He made no secret that he cared more for the son of his son who was the heir, and was to perpetuate the name of von Basedow, than for the son of his daughter. He was very fond of driving and of shooting, and he frequently took my cousin out shooting with him. When my cousin came home with a hare he had shot, I confess I was sometimes jealous, but I was soon cured of my wish to go with my grandfather into the forest. Once when I was with him in his little carriage, my grandfather, not being able to see well, had the misfortune to kill a doe which had come out with her two little ones. The misery of the mother and afterwards of her two young ones, was heart-rending, and from that day on I made up my mind never to go out shooting, and never to kill an animal. And I have kept my word, though I was much laughed at. It may be that later in life and after my grandfather’s death I had little opportunity of shooting, but the cry of the doe and the whimpering of the young ones who tried to get suck from their dead mother have remained with me for life.
My grandfather, though he aged early, remained in harness as Prime Minister to the end of his life, and it was his great desire to benefit his country by new institutions. It was he who, at the time when people hardly knew yet what railroads meant, succeeded in getting the line from Berlin to Halle and Leipzig to pass by Dessau. He offered to build the bridge across the Elbe and to give the land and the wood for the sleepers gratis, and what seemed at the time a far too generous offer has proved a blessing to the duchy, making it as it were the centre of the great railway connecting Berlin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, the Elbe, Hanover, Bremen, nay, Cologne also, the Rhine, and Western Europe. He was in his way a good statesman, though we are too apt to measure a man’s real greatness by the circumstances in which he moves.
As far back as I can remember I was a martyr to headaches. No doctor could help me, no one seemed to know the cause. It was a migraine, and though I watched it carefully I could not trace it to any fault of mine. The idea that it came from overwork was certainly untrue. It came and went, and if it was one day on the right side it was always the next time on the left, even though I was free from it sometimes for a week or a fortnight, or even longer. It was strange also that it seldom lasted beyond one day, and that I always felt particularly strong and well the day after I had been prostrate. For prostrate I was, and generally quite unable to do anything. I had to lie down and try to sleep. After a good sleep I was well, but when the pain had been very bad I found that sometimes the very skin of my forehead had peeled off. In this way I often lost two or three days in a week, and as my work had to be done somehow, it was often done anyhow, and I was scolded and punished, really without any fault of my own. After all remedies had failed which the doctor and nurses prescribed (and I well remember my grandmother using massage on my neck, which must have been about 1833 to 1835) I was handed over to Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy. Hahnemann (born 1755) had been practising as doctor at Dessau as early as 1780—that is somewhat before my time—but had left it, and when in 1820 he had been prohibited by the Government from practising and lecturing at Leipzig, he took refuge once more in the neighbouring town of Coethen. From there he paid visits to Dessau as consulting physician, and after I had explained to him as well as I could all the symptoms of my chronic headache, he assured my mother that he would cure it at once. He was an imposing personality—a powerful man with a gigantic head and strong eyes and a most persuasive voice. I can quite understand that his personal influence would have gone far to effect a cure of many diseases. People forget too much how strong a curative power resides in the patient’s faith in his doctor, in fact how much the mind can do in depressing and in reinvigorating the body. I shall never forget in later years consulting Sir Andrew Clarke, and telling him of ever so many, to my mind, most serious symptoms. I had lost sleep and appetite, and imagined myself in a very bad state indeed. He examined me and knocked me about for full three quarters of an hour, and instead of pronouncing my doom as I fully expected, he told me with a bright look and most convincing voice that he had examined many men who had worked their brains too much, but had never seen a man at my time of life so perfectly sound in every organ. I felt young and strong at once, and meeting my old friend Morier on my way home, we ate some dozens of oysters together and drank some pints of porter without the slightest bad effect. In fact I was cured without a pill or a drop of medicine.
And who does not know how, if one makes up one’s mind at last to have a tooth pulled out, the pain seems to cease as soon as we pull the bell at the dentist’s?
However, Hahnemann did not succeed with me. I swallowed a number of his silver and gold globules, but the migraine kept its regular course, right to left and left to right, and this went on till about the year 1860. Then my doctor, the late Mr. Symonds of Oxford, told me exactly what Hahnemann had told me—that he would cure me, if I would go on taking some medicine regularly for six months or a year. He told me that he and his brother had made a special study of headaches, and that there were ever so many kinds of headache, each requiring its own peculiar treatment. When I asked him to what category of headaches mine belonged, I was not a little abashed on being told that my headache was what they called the Alderman’s headache. “Surely,” I said, “I don’t overeat, or overdrink.” I had thought that mine was a mysterious nervous headache, arising from the brain. But no, it seemed to be due to turtle soup and port wine. However, the doctor, seeing my surprise, comforted me by telling me that it was the nerves of the head which affected the stomach, and thus produced indirectly the same disturbance in my digestion as an aldermanic diet. Whether this was true or was only meant as a solatium I do not know. But what I do know is, that by taking the medicine regularly for about half a year, the frequency and violence of my headaches were considerably reduced, while after about a year they vanished completely. I was a new being, and my working time was doubled.
One lesson may be learnt from this, namely, that the English system of doctoring is very imperfect. In England we wait till we are ill, then go to a doctor, describe our symptoms as well as we can, pay one guinea, or two, get our prescription, take drastic medicine for a month and expect to be well. My German doctor, when he saw the prescription of my English doctor, told me that he would not give it to a horse. If after a month we are not better we go again; he possibly changes our medicine, and we take it more or less regularly for another month. The doctor cannot watch the effect of his medicine, he is not sure even whether his prescriptions have been carefully followed; and he knows but too well that anything like a chronic complaint requires a chronic treatment. The important thing, however, was that my headaches yielded gradually to the continued use of medicine; it would hardly have produced the desired effect if I had taken it by fits and starts. All this seems to me quite natural; but though my English doctor cured me, and my German doctors did not, I still hold that the German system is better. Most families have their doctor in Germany, who calls from time to time to watch the health of the old and young members of the family, particularly when under medical treatment, and receives his stipulated annual payment, which secures him a safe income that can be raised, of course, by attendance on occasional patients. Perhaps the Chinese system is the best; they pay their doctor while they are well, and stop payment as long as they are ill. I know the unanswerable argument which is always thrown at my head whenever I suggest to my friends that there are some things which are possibly managed better in Germany than in England. If my remarks refer to the study and practice of medicine I am asked whether more men are killed in England than in Germany; if I refer to the study and practice of law I am assured that quite as many murderers are hanged in England as in Germany; and if I venture to hint that the study of theology might on certain points be improved at Oxford, I am told that quite as many souls are saved in England as in Germany, nay, a good many more. As I cannot ascertain the facts from trustworthy statistics, I have nothing to reply; all I feel is that most nations, like most individuals, are perfect in their own eyes, but that those are most perfect who are willing to admit that there is something to be learnt from their neighbours.
But to return to Hahnemann. He was very kind to me, and I looked up to him as a giant both in body and in mind. But he could not deliver me from my enemy, the ever recurrent migraine. The cures, however, both at Dessau and at Coethen, where he had been made a Hofrath by the reigning Duke, were very extraordinary. Hahnemann remained in Coethen till 1835, and in that year, when he was eighty, he married a young French lady, Melanie d’Hervilly, and was carried off by her to Paris, where he soon gained a large practice, and died in 1843, that is at the age of eighty-eight. Much of his success, I feel sure, was due to his presence and to the confidence which he inspired. How do I know that Sir Andrew Clarke, seeing that I was in low spirits about my health, did not think it right to encourage me, and by encouraging me did certainly make me feel confident about myself, and thus raised my vitality, my spirits, or whatever we like to call it? “Thy faith hath made thee whole” is a lesson which doctors ought not to neglect.