Shakspeare has drawn a quack doctor to the life in Caius, the French physician, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and uttered an impressive protest against the tribe in All’s Well that Ends Well:—
‘King. But may not be so credulous of cure,
When our most learned doctors leave us; and
The congregated college have concluded
That labouring art can never ransom nature
From her inaidable estate: I say we must not
So stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope,
To prostitute our past-cure malady
To empirics; or to dissever so
Our great self and our credit, to esteem
A senseless help, when help past sense we deem.’
An American member of the medical profession[15] has traced in the great bard of nature a minute knowledge of the healing art, citing his various allusions to diseases and their remedies. Thus we have in Coriolanus the ‘post-prandial temper of a robust man,’ and the physiology of madness in Hamlet and Lear. The wasting effects of love, melancholy, the processes of digestion, respiration, circulation of the blood, infusion of humours, effects of passions on the body, of slow and swift poisons, insomnia, dropsy, and other phenomena described with accuracy. Cæsar’s fever in Spain, Gratiano’s warning, ‘creep into a jaundice by being peevish;’ the physical effects of sensualism in Antony and Cleopatra, the external signs of sudden death from natural causes in Henry VI., and summary of diseases in Troilus and Cressida, are described with professional truth. How memorable his Apothecary’s portrait! while the medical critic assures us that, in a passage in Midsummer-Night’s Dream, the ‘accessories of a sickly season are poetically described,’ and that Falstaff admirably satirizes the ‘ambiguities of professional opinion,’ while, in Mrs. Quickly’s description of his death, and the dying scene of Cardinal Beaufort, as well as the senility of Lear, the mellow virility of old Adam, the ‘thick-coming fancies’ of remorse, and Ophelia’s aberration—every minute touch in the memorable picture of ‘a mind diseased’—indicate a profound insight, and suggest, as no other poet can, how intimately and universally the ‘ills that flesh is heir to,’ and the vocation of those who minister to health, are woven into the web of human destiny and the scenes of human life. Who has so sweetly celebrated ‘Nature’s sweet restorer’ and the ‘healing touch’? or more emphatically declared, ‘when the mind’s free the body’s delicate,’ and—
‘We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands
The mind to suffer with the body.’
The memoirs of celebrated men abound with physiological interest; their eminence brings out facts which serve to vindicate impressively the phases of medical experience, and the relation of the soul to its tabernacle. Madden’s Infirmities of Genius is a book which suggests an infinite charity, as well as exposes the fatal effects of neglecting natural laws. Lord Byron used to declare that a dose of salts exhilarated him more than wine. Shelley was a devoted vegetarian. Cowper spoke from experience when he sang the praises of the cups ‘that cheer but not inebriate.’ Johnson had faith in the sanative quality of dried orange-peel. When Dr. Spurzheim was first visited by the physicians in his last illness, he told them to allow for the habitual irregularity of his pulse, which had intermitted ever since the death of his wife. George Combe used to tell a capital story, in his lectures, of the manner in which a pious Scotch lady made her grandson pass Sunday, whereby, while outwardly keeping the Sabbath, he violated all the rules of health. Two of the most characteristic books in British literature are Greene’s poem of the Spleen, and Dr. Cheyne’s English Malady; and another is the history of the Gold-headed Cane, or rather of the five doctors that successively owned it. The cane, indeed, was ever an indispensable symbol of medical authority. The story of Dr. Radcliffe’s illustrates its modern significance; but the association of the walking-staff and the doctor comes down to us from mediæval times. ‘He smelt his cane,’ in the old ballads, is a phrase suggestive of a then common expedient; the head of the physician’s cane was filled with disinfectant herbs, the odour of which the owner inhaled when exposed to miasma. Even at this day, in some of the provincial towns in Italy, we encounter the doctor in the pharmacist’s shop, awaiting patients,—his dress and manner such as are reproduced in the comic drama, while the quack of the Piazza is recognized on the operatic stage.
How unprofessional medicine is becoming may be seen in current literature, when De Quincey’s metaphysical account of the effects of opium, and Bulwer’s fascinating plea for the Water-Cure, are ranked as light reading. To the lover of the old English prose-writers there is no more endeared name than Sir Thomas Browne, and his Religio Medici and quaint tracts are among the choicest gifts for which philosophy is indebted to the profession; while the classical student owes to Dr. Middleton a Life of Cicero. The vivacious Lady Montagu is most gratefully remembered for her philanthropic efforts in behalf of inoculation for smallpox; and our Brockden Brown has described the phenomena of an epidemic, in one of his novels, with more insight though less horror than Defoe.
It is in pestilence and after battle that the doctor sometimes rises to the moral sublime, in his disinterested and unwearied devotion to others. It must, however, be confessed that, notwithstanding these incidental laurels, the authority of the profession has so declined, the malades imaginaires so increased with civilization, and the privileges of the faculty been so encroached upon by what is called ‘progress,’ that a doctor of the old school would scorn to tolerate the fallen dignity of a title that once rendered his intercourse with society oracular, and authorized him with impunity to whip a king, as in the case of Dr. Willis and George the Third.
‘The philosophy of medicine, I imagine,’ observed Dr. Arnold, ‘is zero; our practice is empirical, and seems hardly more than a course of guessing, more or less happy.’ None have been more sceptical than physicians themselves in regard to their own science: Broussais calls it illusory, like astrology; and Bichat declares ‘it is, in respect to its principles, taken from most of our materia medicas, impracticable for a sensible man; an incoherent assemblage of incoherent opinions, it is, perhaps, of all the physiological sciences, the one which shows plainest the contradictions and wanderings of the human mind.’ Montaigne used to beseech his friends that, if he fell ill, they would let him get a little stronger before sending for the doctor. Louis XIV., who was a slave to his physicians, asked Molière what he did for his doctor. ‘Oh, sire,’ said he, ‘when I am ill I send for him. He comes; we have a chat, and enjoy ourselves. He prescribes; I don’t take it,—and I am cured.’
‘There is a certain analogy,’ says an agreeable writer, ‘between naval and medical men. Neither like to acknowledge the presence of danger.’ On the other hand, each patient’s character as well as constitution makes a separate demand upon his sympathy; for in cases where fortitude and intelligence exist, perfect frankness is due, and in instances of extreme sensibility it may prove fatal; so that the most delicate consideration is often required to decide on the expediency of enlightening the invalid. If it is folly to theorize in medicine, it is often sinful to flatter the imagination for the purpose of securing temporary ease. A physician’s course, like that of men in all pursuits, is sometimes regulated by his consciousness, and he is apt to prescribe according to his own rather than his patient’s nature; thus a fleshy doctor is inclined to bleed, and recommend generous diet; a nervous one affects mild anodynes; a vain one talks science; and a thin, cold-blooded, speculative one, makes safe experiments in practice, and is habitually non-committal in speech. Almost invariably short-necked plethoric doctors enjoy freeing the vessels of others by copious depletion, and those more delicately organized advocate fresh air and tonics; the one instinctively reasoning from the surplus, and the other from the inadequate vitality of which they are respectively conscious. I knew a doctor who scarcely ever failed to prescribe an emetic, and the expression of his countenance indicated chronic nausea.
Medicine enjoys no immunity from the spirit of the age. Who does not recognize in the popularity of Hahnemann’s system the influence of the transcendental philosophy, a kind of intuitive practice analogous to the vague terms of its disciples in literature; those little globules with the theoretical accompaniment catch the fancy; castor-oil and the lancet are matter-of-fact in comparison. And so with hydropathy. There is in our day what may be called a return-to-nature school. Wordsworth is its expositor in poetry, Fourier in social life, the Pre-Raphaelites in painting. The newly-appreciated efficacy of water accords with this principle. It is an elemental medicament, limpid as the style of Peter Bell, free from admixture as the individual labour in a model community, and as directly caught from nature as the aërial perspective of England’s late scenic limner. Even what has been considered the inevitable resort to dissection in order to acquire anatomical knowledge, it is now pretended, has a substitute in clairvoyance. Somewhat of truth in this spiritualizing tendency of science there doubtless is; but fact is the basis of positive knowledge, and the most unwarrantable of all experiments are those involving human health.