Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

Still believing in my simplicity that great surgeons might remedy every evil, I went again to London to consult the most eminent, and by the mistake of a friend, it chanced that I summoned two very great personages on the same day, though, fortunately, at different hours. The case was, of course, of the simplest; but the two gentlemen gave me precisely opposite advice. One sent me abroad to certain baths, which proved to be the wrong ones for my trouble, and gave me a letter to his friend there, a certain Baron. The moment the Baron-Doctor saw my foot he exclaimed that it ought never to have been allowed to get into the state of swollen veins and arrested circulation in which he found it; astringents and all sorts of measures ought to have been applied. In truth I was in a most miserable condition, for I could not drop the limb for two minutes without the blood running into it till it became like an ink-bottle, when, if I held it up, it became as white as if dead. And all this had been getting worse and worse while I was consulting ten doctors in succession, and chiefly the most eminent in England! The Baron-Doctor first told me that the waters would bring out the gout, and then, when I objected, assured me they should not bring it out; after which I relinquished the privilege of his visits and he charged me for an entire course of treatment.

The second great London surgeon told me not to go abroad, but to have a gutta-percha boot made for my leg to keep it stiff. I had the boot made, (with much distress and expense), took it abroad in my trunk, and asked the successor of the Baron-Doctor (who could make the waters give the gout or not as he pleased), “Whether he advised me to wear the wonderful machine?” The good old Frenchman, who was also Mayor of his town, and who did me more good than anybody else, replied cautiously, “If you wish, Madame, to be lame for life you will wear that boot. A great many English come to us here to be unstiffened after having had their joints stiffened by English surgeons’ devices of this sort, but we can do nothing for them. A joint once thoroughly stiff can never be restored.” It may be guessed that the expensive boot was quietly deposited on the nearest heap of rubbish.

After that experience I tried the baths in Savoy and others in Italy. But my lameness seemed permanent. A great Italian Doctor could think of nothing better than to put a few walnut-leaves on my ankle—a process which might perhaps have effected something in fifty years! Only the good and great Nélaton, whom I consulted in Paris, told me he believed I should recover some time; but he could not tell me anything to do to hasten the event. Returned to London I sent for Sir William Fergusson, and that honest man on hearing my story said simply: “And if you had gone to nobody and not bandaged your ankle, but merely bathed it, you would have been well in three weeks.” Thus I learned from the best authority, that I had paid for the folly of consulting an eminent surgeon for a common sprain, by four years of miserable helplessness and by the breaking up of my whole plan of life.

I must conclude this dismal record by one last trait of medical character. I had determined, after seeing Fergusson, to consult no other doctor; indeed I could ill afford to do so. But a friend conveyed to me a message from a London surgeon of repute (since dead) that he would like to be allowed to treat me gratuitously; having felt much interest in my books. I was simple enough to fall into the trap and to feel grateful for his offer: and I paid him several visits, during which he chatted pleasantly, and once did some trifling thing to relieve my foot. One day I wrote and asked him kindly to advise me by letter about some directions he had given me; whereupon he answered tartly that he “could not correspond; and that I must always attend at his house.” The suspicion dawned on me, and soon reached conviction, that what he wanted was not so much to cure me, as to swell the scanty show of patients in his waiting-room! Of course after this, I speedily retreated; offering many thanks and some small, and as I hoped, acceptable souvenir with inscription to lie on his table. But when I thought this had concluded my relations with Mr. ——, I found I had reckoned without my—doctor! One after another he wrote to me three or four peremptory notes requesting me to send him introductions for himself or his family, to influential friends of mine rather out of his sphere. I would rather have paid him fifty fees than have felt bound to give these introductions.

Finally I ceased to do anything whatever to my unfortunate ankle, except what most of my advisers had forbidden, namely, to walk upon it,—and a year or two afterwards I climbed Cader Idris; walking quietly with my friend to the summit. Sitting there, on the Giants’ Chair we passed an unanimous resolution. It was: “Hang the Doctors!”

I must now set down a few recollections of the many friends and interesting acquaintances whom I met at Bristol. In the first place I may say briefly that all Miss Carpenter’s friends (mostly Unitarians) were very kind to me, and that though I did not go out to any sort of entertainment while I lived with her, it was not for lack of hospitable invitations.

The family next to that of the Dean with which I became closely acquainted and to which I owed most, was that of Matthew Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, whose labours (summed up in his own Repression of Crime and in his Biography by his daughters) did more, I believe, than those of any other philanthropist beside Mary Carpenter, to improve the treatment of both adult and juvenile crime in England. I am not competent to offer judgment on the many questions of jurisprudence with which he dealt, but I can well testify to the exceeding goodness of his large heart, the massiveness of his grasp of his subjects, and (never-to-be-forgotten) his most delightful humour. He was a man who from unlucky chances never attained a position commensurate with his abilities and his worth, but who was beloved and admired in no ordinary degree by all who came near him. His family of sons and daughters formed a centre of usefulness in the neighbourhood of Bristol as they have since done in London, where Miss Hill is, I believe, now the senior member of the School Board, while her sister, Miss Florence Davenport Hill, has been equally active as a Poor Law Guardian, and most especially as the promoter of the great and farreaching reform in the management of pauper orphans, known as the system of Boarding-out, of which I have spoken in the last chapter. I must not indulge myself by writing at too great length of such friends, but will insert here a few notes I made of Recorder Hill’s wonderfully interesting conversation during a Christmas visit I paid to him at Heath House.

“Dec. 26th. I spent yesterday and last night with my kind friends the Hills at Heath House. In the evening I drew out the Recorder to speak of questions of evidence, and he told me many remarkable anecdotes in his own practice at the Bar, of doubtful identity, &c. On one occasion a case was tried three times; and he observed how the certainty of the witnesses, the clearness of details, and unhesitating asseveration of facts which at first had been doubtfully stated, grew in each trial. He said ‘the most dangerous of all witnesses are those who honestly give false witness—a most numerous class.’

“To-day he invited me to walk with him on his terrace and up and down the approach. The snow lay thick on the grass, but the sun shone bright, and I walked for more than an hour and a-half beside the dear old man. He told me how he had by degrees learned to distrust all ideas of Retribution, and to believe in the ‘aggressive power of love and kindness,’ (a phrase Lady Byron had liked); and how at last it struck him that all this was in the new Testament; and that few, except religious Christians, ever aided the great causes of philanthropy. I said, it was quite true, Christ had revealed that religion of love; and that there were unhappily very few who, having intellectually doubted the Christian creed, pressed on further to any clear or fervent religion beyond; but that without religion, i.e., love of God, I hardly believed it possible to work for man. He said he had known nearly all the eminent men of his time in every line, and had somehow got close to them, and had never found one of them really believe Christianity. I said, ‘No; no strong intellect of our day could do so, altogether; but that I thought it was faithless in us to doubt that if we pushed bravely on to whatever seemed truth we should there find all the more reason to love God and man, and never lose any real good of Christianity.’ He agreed, but said, ‘You are a watchmaker, I am a weaver; this is your work, I have a different one,—and I cannot afford to part with the Evangelicals, who are my best helpers. Thus though I wholly disagree with them about Sunday I never publish my difference.’ I said I felt the great danger of pushing uneducated people beyond the bounds of an authoritative creed, and for my own part would think it safest that Jowett’s views should prevail for a generation, preparatory to Theism.

“Then we spoke of Immortality, and he expressed himself nobly on the thought that all our differences of rich and poor, wise or ignorant, are lost in comparison of that one fact of our common Immortality. As he said, he felt that waiting a moment jostled in a crowd at a railway station, was a larger point in comparison of his whole life than this life is, to the future. We joined in condemning Emerson and George Eliot’s ideas of the ‘little value’ of ordinary souls. His burst of indignation at her phrase ‘Guano races of men’ was very fine. He said, talking of Reformatories, ‘A century hence,—in 1960,—some people will walk this terrace and talk of the great improvement of the new asylums where hopeless criminals and vicious persons will be permanently consigned. They will not be formally condemned for life, but we shall all know that they will never fulfil the conditions of their release. They will not be made unhappy, but forced to work and kept under strong control; the happiest state for them.’”