Then there were fearful tortures in the way of excoriations, of which St. John Long’s famous remedy was a notable example,—blisters, cauteries, and setons, too unpleasant to dwell upon. Scarification was a comparatively merciful form of these inflictions. It was practised, according to Prosper Albinus (Hist. Phys., p. 17), in the following agreeable manner: “First, make a strait [tight] ligature on the leg; then rub the leg below it, put it into warm water, and beat till it swells, and so scarify”! Something worse than this was practised down to the present generation in the case of wounds. It is in the writer’s recollection that an unhappy groom who had lost a piece of flesh out of the calf of his leg sought assistance after his accident from a motherly old cook, the medical adviser in ordinary of the whole household. The good woman evidently held the doctrine of Sacrificial Medicine deep in her soul, as well as a due estimate of the utility, under all circumstances, of the art of cookery. Encouraging the poor young man with suitable reflections on the purifying use of salt and fire, she accordingly rubbed a handful from her salt-box into the wound, and then held the miserable limb steadily to the kitchen fire!

A bath of blood has been frequently employed to resuscitate exhausted patients. When Cæsar Borgia barely survived swallowing his share of the bottles of poisoned wine which his respectable father, Pope Alexander VI., had intended for the Cardinal, but took by mistake for himself and his son, it is said that an ox was brought into Cæsar’s apartments and disembowelled, to enable him to get into it and receive such vitality as the warm, bleeding carcass might impart. We are here at the point where Sacrificial Medicine assumes the vicarious form, and the poor brutes are made to suffer instead of the human patients for the benefit of the latter. In an account of the birth of the Duc de Bourgogne, grandson of Louis XIV., in the Curiosités Historiques (p. 48), amid the description of the raptures of the splendid court assembled on the occasion, there is a casual mention of an incident affording a wonderful contrast to all this royal joy and magnificence. The attendant chief accoucheur, the celebrated Dr. Clement, to prevent suffering on the part of the mother (the Dauphine), applied to her person the skin of a sheep, newly flayed. To obtain this quite fresh, a butcher was engaged to skin the animal alive in the adjoining room; and, being anxious to offer the skin as quickly as possible to the doctor, he carried it into the chamber of the Dauphine, leaving the door open. The sheep, in its agony, followed him, and ran in, bleeding and skinless, among the shrieking crowd of courtiers and grandees. In modern times, worse things than these are done to animals, professedly for the benefit of mankind; but they are now performed quietly in physiological laboratories, not paraded in public, else it is to be believed that even the most selfish among us would cry, “Hold! we desire no cure of disease, no scientific knowledge, at any such horrible price.”

Yet, again, there was a class of Sacrificial Remedies whose merit consisted in requiring the patient to travel a long way, or to apply to some hardly accessible personage, to obtain relief. There were Holy Wells having no medicinal properties whatever, which cured all the multitudes of people who made long and painful pilgrimages to reach them. More remarkable still were the benefits derived in cases of scrofula from being touched by a king,—a privilege, it may be safely guessed, not accorded without some delay and solicitation, and possibly not without fees to royal attendants, scarcely disinterested witnesses of the miracles which followed. The history of this particular delusion would alone form a very curious chapter, since Archbishop Bradwardine, in 1348, appealed to the whole world in proof of the wonder, till Samuel Johnson’s scarred and mighty head was subjected to the royal touch. When we recall the fact that only in the eighteenth century did a special religious service for the ceremony cease to form a part of the Liturgy of the Church of England, we do not seem to ourselves to have yet advanced a great way beyond this harmless superstition. Indeed, it is only in the present generation that the scientific name of the malady has generally superseded its familiar title of the “King’s Evil,” or by ellipsis “the Evil,” by which it is even now known in remote parts of the country.

Where it was impossible to obtain help from a king, there yet remained the possibility of being touched by somebody else, who might possess some rare and peculiar privilege and fitness for healing disease. The odd malady, popularly called “shingles,” for example, somehow suggested to the sufferers the desirability of having recourse to some special agency of relief; and this was found in persons who had either themselves eaten the flesh of an eagle, or whose fathers or ancestors had done so. Within the last thirty years, a gentleman’s servant in Wales has been known to perform a journey of forty miles across the mountains to be touched by a man whose grandfather had eaten an eagle.

Finally, there is a large heterogeneous class of prescriptions, obviously owing their origin to the principle of Sacrificial Medicine, of which the simple rule has been to prevent the miserable patient from adopting any mode of relief for his sufferings which Nature might point out, and adding to them fresh pain by any ingenious device which may occur to his physician. Of this kind was the treatment of fever in vogue till quite recently, when the patient was carefully shut up in a close room, with well-curtained bed and warm bedclothes, and was prohibited from relieving his thirst with any cold drink. Truly, if Marcellus Sidetes, who is said to have written forty-two books in “heroic” verse “concerning distempers,” had given us a picture of all the misery which must have been occasioned in the world by the really insolent disregard of Nature and common sense shown in these matters,—how many thousands of lives have been thrown away, and through what maddening misery the survivors must have struggled back to life,—those poems, instead of being forgotten by the world, might have done us precious service by reminding us that there is some counterweight to be placed in the scale wherein we are wont to measure our debts of gratitude to medical science.

Another appalling device was that of the renowned English physician, John of Gaddesden, who introduced the practice of treating the small-pox by wrapping up the patient in scarlet, hanging his room in scarlet, and in fact compelling him to rest his feverish eyes only on that flaring hue. John tried this notable device, according to his own showing, on one of the sons of King Edward I. (it does not appear to which he refers), and complacently adds to his report, “et est bona cura.” In those days, however, doors and windows were not made air-tight, and up the capacious chimneys a considerable portion of fresh air must always have rushed. It was reserved for a later generation to perfect the ingenious system for aggravating and intensifying fever by pasting down the modern window, closing the registers, and (as a climax) engaging nurses to lie beside the sufferer to keep up the heat! The writer heard some years ago from the lips of a Member of Parliament, now deceased, the recital of his own treatment as a boy, in or near London, under a severe attack of small-pox. His life being specially valuable as that of an only son, his affectionate parents, by the advice of a distinguished physician, obtained the services of two fat women, who were established permanently in bed on each side of the child during the whole course of the disease! What stipend was offered to tempt these poor obese females to perform this awful service has escaped from the record.

Reading over all these marvellous prescriptions, it is a refreshing exercise to picture the fashionable “leech,” the Gull or Jenner of the period, physician in ordinary to the King or Queen, suave and solemn, filled to the brim with all the conscious dignity of Science, standing beside the sick-bed of some mighty prince or peer, and giving to the awe-stricken attendants his high commands to hang the room with scarlet cloth, or to bring to the patient one of the horrid messes prepared with such infinite pains under his direction, in his own laboratory. We can almost hear him condescendingly explaining to the chief persons present what occult relationship exists between the small-pox and the scarlet cloth, or how the Arcanum of Toads comes to be specially valuable, having been composed of the fattest old toads, selected precisely at the right season,—videlicet midsummer. Of course, in each successive generation there was nothing for the unlearned laity to do but to bow submissively to the dicta of the exponent of Science as it existed at the time. People may always laugh at what is past and gone; but to suspect that living men may be mistaken, or that new systems of medicine, philosophy, or theology, may be destined, like the old, to “have their day and cease to be,” is audacity to which no one should advance. We dare not, therefore, suggest that, to our grandsons, half our modern nostrums (of which the fashion comes in freshly one season and usually falls into disrepute a few years after) may possibly appear scarcely a degree less ridiculous than the Arcanum of Toads or the Mummiall Quintessence. It was not much worse, after all, to make a patient drink a dead man’s blood than to rob him of his own, in the Sangrado style to which (in the memory of us all) the world owes the loss of Cavour. It would have been a mercy to a poor Florentine lady, lately deceased, had her physician counselled her merely to eat earth-worms pickled in vinegar, or green lizards boiled alive in oil, as recommended by Dr. Salmon, instead of bleeding her from the arm nineteen times in the fortnight following her confinement and (as may be readily understood) preceding her untimely death.

Sacrificial Medicine, however, in its simpler and more easily recognizable forms, is undoubtedly on the wane, though a good deal of its spirit may still be traced in our behavior to the sick. To homœopathy (as to many another kind of heresy), we probably owe somewhat of the mitigation of orthodoxy; and children, noticing the busts of Hahnemann in the shop windows, may be properly taught to bless that great deliverer who banished from the nursery those huge and hateful mugs of misery,—black founts of so many infantine tears,—mugs of sobs and sighs and gasps and struggles unutterable, from one of which Madame Roland drew the first inspiration of that martyr spirit which led her onward to the guillotine, when she suffered herself to be whipped six times running, sooner than swallow the abominable contents.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] As the modern mind may be a little puzzled as to the mode in which some of these substances can be introduced into our internal economy, the following extract from the Family Dictionary of Dr. Salmon (1696) may throw light on the subject: “Coral, to prepare,—Take such a quantity as ye think convenient. Make it into a fine powder by grinding it upon a Porphyry or an Iron Mortar. Drop on it by degrees a little rosewater, and form it into balls for use. After this manner, Crabs’-Eyes, Pearls, Oister shells, and Precious stones are prepared to make up Cordials compounded of them and other suitable materials for the strengthening of the heart in fevers, or such like violent diseases, and to restore the Decays of nature.” Ebony is swallowed by rasping it in shavings and making a decoction.