‘Friend of my life, which did not you prolong,
The world had wanted many an idle song;’
of Garth ministering to Johnson, and Rush philosophizing, with Dr. Franklin, and the friendship of Pope and Cheselden. Bell’s comments on art, Colden’s Letters to Linnæus, and Thatcher’s Military Journal, are attractive proofs of that liberal tendency which leads the physician beyond the limits of his profession into the field of philosophical research. The bequest of Sir Hans Sloane was the nucleus of the British Museum. We all have a kind of affection for Dr. Slop, who, drawn from Dr. Burton, of York—a cruel, instrumental obstetrician,—is the type of an almost obsolete class, as the doctor in Macbeth is of the sapient pretender of all time. As to ideal doctors, how real to our minds is that Wordsworthean myth Dr. Fell, the physician of Sancho Panza, and the Purgon of Molière; while Dulcamara is a permanent type of the clever quack, Dr. Bartolo of the solemn professor, and Sangrado of the merciless phlebotomist. To think it ‘more honourable to fail according to rule than to succeed by innovation,’ is a satire of no local significance, but the constant creed of the medical pedant. Satirized years ago by the French comic dramatist, the profession was caricatured the other day by a young disciple of Esculapius, who in a clever drawing represented the votary of homœopathy with a little globule between thumb and finger, engaged in a kind of airy swallowing; the allopathic patient in an easy-chair is making wry faces over a large spoonful of physic; the believer in hydropathy sits forlorn and shivering in a sitz-bath, with a large goblet of water raised to his lips; while the Thomsonian victim is writhing and nauseating in anguish; and in the midst a skeleton, with a syringe for a baton, is dancing in a transport of infernal joy. Southey took a wise advantage of the popular idea of a doctor, in the genial and speculative phase of the character, when he gave the title to his last rambling, erudite, quaint, and charming production. Men of letters accordingly are wont to fraternize with the best of the profession; and there has always been a reciprocal interchange between them, both of affection and wit. Thus Halleck tells us, in Fanny,—
‘In Physic, we have Francis and M’Neven,
Famed for long heads, short lectures, and long bills;
And Quackenboss and others, who from heaven
Were rained upon us in a shower of pills;
They’d beat the deathless Esculapius hollow,
And make a starveling druggist of Apollo.’
The record of our surgeons in the war for the Union is alike honourable to their patriotism, humanity, and skill.
Popular writers have indicated the claims and character of the profession, not only in a dramatic or anecdotal way, but by personal testimony and observation; and those who have had the best opportunities, and are endowed with liberal sympathies, warmly recognize the possible usefulness and probable benevolence of a class of men more often satirized than sung. The privations and toil incident to country practice half a century ago are scarcely imagined now. Sir Walter Scott tells us,—‘I have heard the celebrated traveller Mungo Park, who had experienced both courses of life, rather give the preference to travelling as a discoverer in Africa, than to wandering by night and day the wilds of his native land in the capacity of a country practitioner.’ Dr. Johnson, a livelong invalid, and not apt to overlook professional foibles, gives a high average character to the doctor. ‘Whether,’ he observes, ‘what Sir William Temple says be true, that the physicians have more learning than the other faculties, I will not stay to inquire; but I believe every man has found in physicians great liberality and dignity of sentiment, very prompt effusion of beneficence, and willingness to exert a lucrative art where there is no hope of lucre.’
It is a nervous process to undergo the examination of a Parisian medical professor of the first class. Auscultation was first introduced by one of them, Laennec, and diagnosis is their chief art. In their hands the stethoscope is a divining-rod. So reliable is their insight, that they seem to read the internal organism as through a glass; and one feels under Louis’s inspection as if awaiting sentence. The laws of disease have been thoroughly studied in the hospitals of Paris, and the philosophy of symptoms is there understood by the medical savans with the certainty of a natural science, but the knowledge and application of remedies is by no means advanced in equal proportion. Accordingly, the perfection of modern skill in the art seems to result from an education in the French schools, combined with experience in English practice; thorough acquaintance with physiology, and habits of acute observation and accurate deduction, are thus united to executive tact and ability. And similar eclectic traits of character are desirable in the physician, especially the union of solidity of mind with agreeableness of manner; for in no vocation is there so often demanded the blending of the fortiter in re with the suaviter in modo.
The absence of faith in positive remedies that obtains in Europe is very striking to an American visitor, because it offers so absolute a contrast to the system pursued at home. I attended the funeral of a countryman a few days after reaching Paris, and on our way to Père la Chaise his case and treatment were fully discussed; his disease was typhus fever. Previous to delirium he had designated a physician, a celebrated professor, who only prescribed gomme syrop. For a week I travelled with a Dominican friar, who had so high a fever that in America he would have been confined to his bed; he took no nourishment all the time but a plate of thin soup once a day, and when we reached our destination he was convalescent. Abstinence and repose are appreciated on the Continent as remedial agencies; but they are contrary to the genius of our people, who regard active enterprise as no less desirable in a doctor than a steamboat captain.
Veteran practitioners have demonstrated that certain diseases are self-limited, that the art of treating diseases is still ‘a conjectural study,’ and avowed the conviction that ‘the amount of death and disaster in the world would be less if all disease were left to itself, than it now is under the multiform, reckless, and contradictory modes of practice.’ A conscientious student, of high personal character, entered upon the profession with enthusiastic faith; experience in the use of remedies made him sceptical, and he resorted to evasion by giving water only under various pretexts and names. His success was so much greater than that of his brethren, that he felt bound to reveal the ruse; but continued thenceforth to assert that, all things being equal, more patients would survive, if properly guarded and nourished, without medicine than with.
The influence of the mind upon the body is, in some instances, so great, that it accounts for that identity of superstition and medicine which is one of the most remarkable traits in the history of the science. Sir Walter Raleigh’s cordial was as famous in its day as Mrs. Trulbery’s water praised by Sir Roger de Coverley. In Egypt, old practitioners cure with amulets and charms; among the Tartars they swallow the name of the remedy with perfect faith; and from the Puritan horseshoe to keep off witchcraft, to Perkins’ tractors to annihilate rheumatism, the history of medical delusions is rife with imaginary triumphs. As late as the seventeenth century, when Arabian precepts and the Jewish leech of chivalric times had disappeared, when the square cap and falling beards had given place to the wig and cane, in some places the mystic emblems of skull, stuffed lizards, pickled fetus, and alembic gave a necromantic air to the doctor’s sanctum.
The unknown is the source of the marvellous, and the relation between a disease and its cure is less obvious to the common understanding than that between the evidence and the verdict in a law case, or religious faith and its public ministration in the office of priest. The imagination has room to act, and the sense of wonder is naturally excited, when, by the agency of some drug, mechanical apparatus, or mystic rite, it is attempted to relieve human suffering and dispel infirmity. Hence the most enlightened minds are apt to yield to credulity in this sphere, much to the annoyance of the ‘regular faculty,’ who complain with reason that quackery, whether in the form of popular specifics or the person of a charlatan, derives its main support from men of civic and professional reputation. Think of Dr. Johnson, in his infancy, being touched for king’s evil by Queen Anne, in accordance with a belief in its sovereign efficiency, unquestioned for centuries. Sir Kenelm Digby was as much celebrated in his day for his recipe for a sympathetic powder, which he obtained from an Italian friar, as for his beautiful wife or his naval victory; and the good Bishop Berkeley gave as much zeal to the Treatise on the Virtues of Tar-water as to that on the Immateriality of the Universe.