To give a finishing touch to the memoir of this celebrated charlatan, it may be added that after his death his property became the subject of tedious litigation; and amongst the claimants upon it was a woman advanced in years, and of an address and style that proved her to belong to a very humble state of life. This woman turned out to be St. John Long's wife. He had married her when quite a lad, had found it impossible to live with her, and consequently had induced her to consent to an amicable separation. This discovery was a source of great surprise, and also of enlightenment to the numerous high-born and richly-endowed ladies who had made overtures of marriage to the idolized quack, and, much to their surprise, had had their advances adroitly but firmly declined.
There are yet to be found in English society, ladies—not silly, frivolous women, but some of those on whom the world of intellect has put the stamp of its approval—who cherish such tender reminiscences of St. John Long, that they cannot mention his name without their eyes becoming bright with tears. Of course this proves nothing, save the credulity and fond infatuation of the fair ones who love. The hands of women decked Nero's tomb with flowers.
THE ANATOMIST
CHAPTER XXII.
THE QUARRELS OF PHYSICIANS.
For many a day authors have had the reputation of being more sensitive and quarrelsome than any other set of men. Truth to tell, they are not always so amiable and brilliant as their works. There is in them the national churlishness inducing them to nurse a contempt for every one they don't personally know, and a spirit of antagonism towards nearly every one they do. But to say this is only to say that they are made of British oak. Unfortunately, however, they carry on their contentions in a manner that gives them a wide publicity and a troublesome duration of fame. Soldiers, when they quarrelled in the last century, shot one another like gentlemen, at two paces' distance, and with the crack of their pistols the whole noise of the matter ceased. Authors, from time immemorial, have in their angry moments rushed into print, and lashed their adversaries with satire, rendered permanent by aid of the printer's devil,—thus letting posterity know all the secrets of their folly, whilst the merciful grave put an end to all memorial of the extravagances of their friends. There was less love between Radcliffe and Hannes, Freind and Blackmore, Gibbons and Garth, than between Pope and Dennis, Swift and Grub Street. But we know all about the squabbles of the writers from their poems; whereas only a vague tradition, in the form of questionable anecdotes, has come down to us of the animosities of the doctors—a tradition which would long ere this have died out, had not Garth—author as well as physician—written the "Dispensary," and a host of dirty little apothecaries contracted a habit of scribbling lampoons about their professional superiors.
Luckily for the members of it, the Faculty of Medicine is singularly barren of biographies. The career of a physician is so essentially one of confidence, that even were he to keep a memorial of its interesting occurrences, his son wouldn't dare to sell it to a publisher as the "Revelations of a Departed Physician." Long ere it would be decent or safe to print such a diary, the public would have ceased to take an interest in the writer. Pettigrew's "Life of Lettsom," and Macilwain's "Memoirs of Abernethy," are almost the only two passable biographies of eminent medical practitioners in the English language; and the last of these does not presume to enter fully on the social relations of the great surgeon. The lives of Hunter and Jenner are meagre and unworthily executed, and of Bransby Cooper's Life of his uncle little can be said that is not in the language of emphatic condemnation.
From this absence of biographical literature the medical profession at least derives this advantage—the world at large knows comparatively little of their petty feuds and internal differences than it would otherwise.