A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

"Glenbervie, Glenbervie,
What's good for the scurvy?
For ne'er be your old trade forgot.
In your arms rather quarter
A pestle and mortar,
And your crest be a spruce gallipot."

The brilliant partizan and orator displayed more wit, if not better taste, in his ridicule of Addington, who, in allusion to the rise of his father from a humble position in the medical profession, was ordinarily spoken of by political opponents as "The Doctor." On one occasion, when the Scotch members who usually supported Addington voted in a body with the opposition, Sheridan, with a laugh of triumph, fired off a happy mis-quotation from Macbeth,—"Doctor, the Thanes fly from thee."

Henry Bickersteth, Lord Langdale, was the luckiest of physicians and lawyers. He used the medical profession as a stepping-stone, and the legal profession as a ladder, and had the fortune to win two of the brightest prizes of life—wealth and a peerage—without the humiliation and toil of serving a political party in the House of Commons. The second son of a provincial surgeon, he was apprenticed to his father, and educated for the paternal calling. On being qualified to kill, he became medical attendant to the late Earl of Oxford, during that nobleman's travels on the Continent. Returning to his native town, Kirby Lonsdale, he for awhile assisted his father in the management of his practice; but resolved on a different career from that of a country doctor, he became a member of Caius College, Cambridge, and devoted himself to mathematical study with such success that, in 1808, when he was twenty-eight years old, he became Senior Wrangler and First Smith's prizeman. As late as the previous year he was consulted medically by his father. In 1811 he was called to the bar by the Inner Temple, and from that time till his elevation to the Mastership of the Rolls he was both the most hard-working and hard-worked of the lawyers in the Equity Courts, to which he confined his practice. In 1827 he became a bencher of his Inn; and, in 1835, although he was a staunch and zealous liberal, and a strenuous advocate of Jeremy Bentham's opinions, he was offered a seat on the judicial bench by Sir Robert Peel. This offer he declined, though he fully appreciated the compliment paid him by the Tory chieftain. He had not, however, to wait long for his promotion. In the following year (1836) he was, by his own friends, made Master of the Rolls, and created a peer of the realm, with the additional honour of being a Privy-Councillor. His Lordship died at Tunbridge Wells, in 1851, in his sixty-eighth year. It would be difficult to point to a more enviable career in legal annals than that of this medical lawyer, who won the most desirable honours of his profession without ever sitting in the House of Commons, or acting as a legal adviser of the Crown—and when he had not been called quite twenty-five years. To give another touch to this picture of a successful life, it may be added, that Lord Langdale, after rising to eminence, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, to whom he had formerly been travelling medical attendant.

Love has not unfrequently smiled on doctors, and elevated them to positions at which they would never have arrived by their professional labours. Sir Lucas Pepys, who married the Countess De Rothes, and Sir Henry Halford, whose wife was a daughter of the eleventh Lord St. John of Blestoe, are conspicuous amongst the more modern instances of medical practitioners advancing their social condition by aristocratic alliances. Not less fortunate was the farcical Sir John Hill, who gained for a bride the Honourable Miss Jones, a daughter of Lord Ranelagh—a nobleman whose eccentric opinion, that the welfare of the country required a continual intermixture of the upper and lower classes of society, was a frequent object of ridicule with the caricaturists and lampoon-writers of his time. But the greatest prize ever made by an Æsculapius in the marriage-market was that acquired by Sir Hugh Smithson, who won the hand of Percy's proud heiress, and was created Duke of Northumberland. The son of a Yorkshire baronet's younger son, Hugh Smithson was educated for an apothecary—a vocation about the same time followed for several years by Sir Thomas Geery Cullum, before he succeeded to the family estate and dignity. Hugh Smithson's place of business was Hatton Garden, but the length of time that he there presided over a pestle and mortar is uncertain. In 1736 he became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, but he withdrew from that learned body, on the books of which his signature may be found, in the year 1740. A few months after this secession, Sir Hugh led to the altar the only child and heiress of Algernon Seymour, Duke of Somerset. There still lives a tradition that the lady made the offer to Sir Hugh immediately after his rejection by a famous belle of private rank and modest wealth. Another version of the story is that, when she heard of his disappointment, she observed publicly, "that the disdainful beauty was a fool, and that no other woman in England would be guilty of like folly." On hearing this, the baronet, a singularly handsome man, took courage to sue for that to which men of far higher rank would not have presumed to aspire. The success that followed his daring, of course, brought upon him the arrows of envy. He had won so much, however, that he could, without ill-humour, bear being laughed at. On being created Duke of Northumberland in 1766, he could afford to smile at a proposition that his coronet should be surrounded with senna, instead of strawberry-leaves; for, however much obscure jealousy might affect to contemn him, he was no fit object for disdain—but a gentleman of good intellect and a lordly presence, and (though he had mixed drugs behind a counter) descended from an old and honourable family. The reproach of being a Smithson, and no Percy, had more force when applied to the second duke in the Anti-Jacobin, than it had when hurled vindictively at the ex-doctor himself by the mediocrities of the beau monde, whom he had beaten on their own ground by superior attractions and accomplishments.

"Nay," quoth the Duke, "in thy black scroll
Deductions I espye—
For those who, poor, and mean, and low,
With children burthen'd lie.

"And though full sixty thousand pounds
My vassals pay to me,
From Cornwall to Northumberland,
Through many a fair countree;

"Yet England's church, its king, its laws,
Its cause I value not,
Compared with this, my constant text,
A penny saved is got.

"No drop of princely Percy's blood
Through these cold veins doth run;
With Hotspur's castles, blazon, name,
I still am poor Smithson."

Considering the opportunities that medical men have for pressing a suit in love, and the many temptations to gentle emotion that they experience in the aspect of feminine suffering, and the confiding gratitude of their fair patients, it is perhaps to be wondered at that only one medical duke is to be found in the annals of the peerage. When Swift's Stella was on her death-bed, her physician said, encouragingly—"Madam, you are certainly near the bottom of the hill, but we shall endeavour to get you up once more," the naïve reply of the poor lady was, "Doctor, I am afraid I shall be out of breath before I get to the top again." Not less touching was the fear expressed by Steele's merry daughter to her doctor, that she should "die before the holidays." Both Stella and Sir Richard's child had left their personal charms behind them when they so addressed their physicians; but imagine, my brother, what the effect of such words would be on your susceptible heart, if they came from the lips of a beautiful girl. Would you not (think you) try to win other such speeches from her?—and if you tried, dear sir, surely you would succeed!

Prudence would order a physician, endowed with a heart, to treat it in the same way as Dr. Glynn thought a cucumber ought to be dressed—to slice it very thin, pepper it plentifully, pour upon it plenty of the best vinegar, and then—throw it away. A doctor has quite enough work on his hands to keep the affections of his patients in check, without having to mount guard over his own emotions. Thackeray says that girls make love in the nursery, and practise the arts of coquetry on the page-boy who brings the coals upstairs—a hard saying for simple young gentlemen triumphing in the possession of a first love. The writer of these pages could point to a fair dame, who enjoys rank amongst the highest and wealth equal to the station assigned her by the heralds, who not only aimed tender glances, and sighed amorously to a young waxen-faced, blue-eyed apothecary, but even went so far as to write him a letter proposing an elopement, and other merry arrangements, in which a carriage, everlastingly careering over the country at the heels of four horses, bore a conspicuous part. The silly maiden had, like Dinah, "a fortune in silvyer and gold," amounting to £50,000, and her blue-eyed Adonis was twice her age; but fortunately he was a gentleman of honour, and, without divulging the mad proposition of the young lady, he induced her father to take her away for twelve months' change of air and scene. Many years since the heroine of this little episode, after she had become the wife of a very great man, and the mother of children who bid fair to become ornaments to their illustrious race, expressed her gratitude cordially to this Joseph of the doctors, for his magnanimity in not profiting by the absurd fancies of a child, and the delicacy with which he had taken prompt measures for her happiness; and, more recently, she manifested her good will to the man who had offered her what is generally regarded as the greatest insult a woman can experience, by procuring a commission in the army for his eldest son.