What, then, were the notions in obedience to which these marvellous remedies were ordained? If we exclude from present consideration all the really useful therapeutic agents, discovered doubtless by genuine experience and recorded by the ancient physicians, Galen and Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Avicenna, and all the rest, and also set aside those which, though not really useful, might have been readily mistaken for being so by imperfect early observation, we find the immense residue of absurd and monstrous recipes to fall into two categories; namely, the remedies which were exceedingly costly and the remedies which were either very painful or very disgusting. In other words, a large part of the medical science of all past ages proves that the doctors and their patients valued remedies in proportion to the price to be paid for them, either in money or in suffering. In short, they adopted freely the Doctrine of Sacrifice as applied to medicine. Considering that Nature nearly always proceeds on precisely the opposite track,—that she does not ask us “to do some great thing,” but, like the true prophet, only bids us “wash and be clean”; makes the cheapest and commonest things the most wholesome, and affords us normally, by our instinctive desire or loathing, the surest test of the fitness or unfitness of food for our use,—there is something exceedingly curious in the all but universal assumption of mankind that it was only necessary to find something particularly rare and expensive, or else something extraordinarily revolting, to obtain a panacea for all the woes of mortality. It was ridiculous (in the estimation of our forefathers) to suppose that a great noble or king should dissolve pearls in his drink or swallow liquid gold, and yet, forsooth, be no better after all than a poor wretch who could afford himself only a little milk or water. Still more incredible was it that a man should submit to some agonizing scarification or actual cautery, or should compel himself to bolt some inexpressibly disgusting mess which his doctor had taken a year to concoct and distil through a score of furnaces and retorts, and yet, when all was over, receive no more benefit than if he had endured no hardship, or had only drunk some cowslip julep or herb tea. Such tame and impotent conclusions could not be received for a moment. If patients would only pay enough or suffer enough, they must be cured. This, it really seems, was the underlying conviction of men of old, on which half the therapeutics of past times were unconsciously based.
Let us cull a few illustrations of the ingenious development of those principles by the invention of nostrums distinguished by one or other of the grand characteristics, roughly definable as costliness or nastiness. Perhaps, ere the close of our brief review, we may find we have less reason than we fancy at starting to congratulate ourselves on the disappearance of this phase of human folly, or to rest assured that inductive science alone now rules in the sick-room, and that neither doctors nor patients retain any faith in sacrificial medicine.
The use of costly things as remedies for disease constitutes a kind of haute médecine necessarily of limited application. With the exception of the great search for the Aurum Potabile in the Middle Ages, there are much fewer traces of it than of the other form of sacrifice, in which the patient payait de sa personne. Everybody could be scarified or made to swallow worms and filth; but there were not many patients who could afford to pay for emeralds to tie on their stomachs in cases of dysentery, as recommended by Avenzor, nor for “eight grains of that noble lunar medicine, the wine of silver,” nor for “dissolved pearls,” either of which (Matthioli assures us) is “sovereign against melancholy.” Dioscorides might in vain recommend powdered sapphires for starting eyes, or St. Jerome vaunt their virtues for many other troubles, to the majority of sufferers in their own or any other age. Coral was more within popular reach; and probably a considerable number of believing souls have followed Galen’s prescription and tried its use for spitting of blood, and Pliny’s recommendation of it for the stone. Avicenna found that a cordial made of it is “singularly productive of joy”; and Matthioli says it has “truly occult virtues against epilepsy,” whether “hung about the neck or drunk in powders.”[26] Emeralds or rubies, and even silk (then a rarer substance in Europe than now), afford, according to Dioscorides, relief in a variety of ailments; but of course nothing could be so generally, and indeed universally, useful as gold. He who could discover how to make men actually drink the most costly of metals would teach them nothing less than the secret of immortality. The Aurum Potabile, or noble “Solar Oyl,” especially when mixed with the “Lunar Oyl” of silver, and “Mercurial Oyl,” forms, as Bolnest assures us, “a great Arcanum, fit to be used in most diseases, especially in chronick.” By itself alone, indeed, the drinkable gold was understood to be an elixir of life,—a conclusion not a little remarkable, when we consider that the only real value of the metal is its convenience as a circulating medium and for the fabrication of ornaments, and that the artificial importance thus attached to it must have so affected men’s minds as to cause them to idealize it as a sort of divine antidote to disease and death.
In an earlier and truer-hearted age, Paradise was believed to be a garden, and it was the Fruit of a Tree of Life which would make men live forever. But when, as Gibbon satirically observes, in the dissolution of the Roman world, men coveted only a place in the Celestial City of gold and pearl, the secret of immortality was sought (not inappropriately) at the bottom of a Rosicrucian crucible.
There was, it must be confessed, a profound vulgarity in this whole system of costly medicine, which it would be flattering to ourselves to think we had in our day quite overpassed and discarded. But in truth, though we are not wont to dissolve pearls or powder emeralds or drink solar or even lunar “Oyl,” it may be fairly asked whether we do not contrive to melt down a handful of sovereigns in every attack of illness to very little better purpose than if we had simply given them to an old alchemist to put in his furnace and make for us an elixir of life? What are these long rows of items in our druggist’s bill for draughts, embrocations, liniments, blisters, gargles, and what not, represented, when the housemaid clears our room for convalescence, by a whole regiment of quarter-emptied phials and pill-boxes on our table? What are those considerable drafts recorded in our check-book, not only for the attendance of our customary medical adviser (which might be reasonable), but for the visits of the eminent consulting physician, brought down, perchance, fifty or five hundred miles to look at us for five minutes while we lay speechless in our fever? Did anybody ever use one-half, or even one-third, of the expensive medicines ordered in every illness from the pharmacy day after day? Or did anybody find a medical man, in view of a patient’s straitened circumstances, telling his anxious friends that the remains of the last bottle of his physic would answer as well as a new one, or that they might readily change it, by adding a few drops of some fresh ingredient, instead of ordering another six ounces from the chemist, to be set aside in its turn, half used, to-morrow? Or (what is still more to the purpose) did anybody ever hear of a case wherein the physician summoned for consultation (possibly at enormous cost) has given his honest opinion that the regular medical attendant of the patient has mistaken his case, and that the treatment ought to be altogether reversed?
The same idea has been at the bottom of our proceedings and those of our ancestors which we ridicule; namely, that if we do but spend money enough, a cure must follow.
But, as I remarked before, the notion that costliness of itself is a test of medicinal virtue has been, necessarily, far less prolific of results than the kindred idea that by the pain and disgust entailed on a patient might be estimated the value of the remedy applied to his disease. As to disgust, it would really appear as if some ancient prophets of the healing art, some Phœbus Epicurios or Æsculapius, must have laid down as a principle for the selection of health-restoring compounds and concoctions, “By their nauseousness ye shall know them.” Else were the recipes for all the hideous, abominable witch-broths, wherewith the older books of medicine are replete, quite unaccountable on any theory of human sanity. Many of them (which weak-souled patients have swallowed by the ounce and the pound) were of a kind which it is quite impossible to quote; nor can we wonder that, as Plato tells us, the Athenian physicians were wont to engage the great rhetorician Gorgias to accompany them and persuade their patients to take their prescriptions. Let the following, however, be taken as moderate examples:—
“Take what Animal soever thy fancy best liketh, and thou thinkest most fit to prepare. Kill it and take it (but separate nothing of its impurities, as feathers, hoofs, hairs, or other heterogeneous substance), bruise all in a large and strong mortar to a fit consistency, put it then into a vessel for putrefaction, and put upon it of the blood of animals of the same kind so much as may well moisten it, or, which is better, cover it all over. Shut close the vessel and set it to putrifie, in fimo equino, for forty dayes that it may ferment.” (The result is to be distilled, calcined, rectified, and distilled over again and again, “seven times to separate its phlegme,” till finally) “thou hast a pleasant [!!], safe, and noble Animal Arcanum to fortifie the animal life, and restore health and vigor to its languishing spirit, till God doth call for its final dissolution and separation.”—Aurora Chymica, p. 6.
This was bad enough, but a great advance (in the line of sacrifice) was made when to the mere odiousness, we may say beastliness, of the dose per se could be added the horror of eating what had once formed part of a human body,—in short, of cannibalism. The ordonnances which follow really seem to have a connection with ancient idol-rites of human sacrifice, and possibly (had we means of tracing them) might be fathered on the earliest worshippers of Hesus or of Odin. The seasons of the year (spring and autumn) wherein the victim must die (very carefully defined in these prescriptions) seem to give color to this view. Down to the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, Helps tells us, the Aztecs used yearly to slay a young man in spring that the nobles might eat his heart as a sort of sacrament. Anyway, it is rather startling to find that just two hundred years ago in London the physician in ordinary to the King recommended cannibalism to Englishmen without the smallest apology or hesitation.
A Mummiall Quintessence.