A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE COUNTRY MEDICAL MAN.

The country doctor, such as we know him—a well-read and observant man, skilful in his art, with a liberal love of science, and in every respect a gentleman—is so recent a creation, that he may almost be spoken of as a production of the present century. There still linger in the provinces veteran representatives of the ignorance which, in the middle of the last century, was the prevailing characteristic of the rural apothecary. Even as late as 1816, the law required no medical education in a practitioner of the healing art in country districts, beyond an apprenticeship to an empiric, who frequently had not information of any kind, beyond the rudest elements of a druggist's learning, to impart to his pupils. Men who commenced business under this system are still to be found in every English county, though in most cases they endeavour to conceal their lack of scientific culture under German or Scotch diplomas—bought for a few pounds.

Scattered over these pages are many anecdotes of provincial doctors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from which a truthful but not complimentary picture of their order may be obtained. Indeed, they were for the most part vulgar drunken knaves, with just learning enough to impose on the foolish crowds who resorted to them. The most brilliant of the fraternity in Henry the Eighth's reign was Andrew Borde, a Winchester practitioner. This gentleman was author and buffoon, as well as physician. He travelled about the country from market to fair, and from fair to market, making comic orations to the crowds who purchased his nostrums, singing songs, and enlivening the proceedings when they were becoming dull with grimaces of inexpressible drollery. It was said of Sir John Hill,

"For physic and farces
His equal there scarce is;
His farces are physic,
His physic a farce is."

Borde's physic doubtless was a farce; but if his wit resembled physic, it did so, not (like Hill's) by making men sick, but by rousing their spirits and bracing their nerves with good hearty laughter. Everywhere he was known as "Merry Andrew," and his followers, when they mounted the bank, were proud to receive the same title.

Mr. H. Fleetwood Sheppard communicated in the year 1855, some amusing anecdotes to "Notes and Queries" about the popular Dorsetshire doctor—little Dr. Grey. Small but warlike, this gentleman, in the reign of James the First, had a following of well-born roisterers that enabled him to beard the High Sheriff at the assizes. He was always in debt, but as he always carried a brandy-flask and a brace of loaded pistols in his pocket or about his neck, he neither experienced the mental harass of impecuniosity nor feared bailiffs. In the hour of peril he blew a horn, which he wore suspended to his person, and the gentlemen of his body-guard rallied round him, vowing they were his "sons," and would die for him. Says the MS.—"This Doctor Grey was once arreste by a pedler, who coming to his house knocked at ye dore as yey (he being desirous of Hobedyes) useth to doe, and ye pedler having gartars upon his armes, and points, &c., asked him whether he did wante any points or gartars, &c., pedler like. Grey hereat began to storme, and ye other tooke him by ye arme, and told him that he had no neede be so angry, and holdinge him fast, told him y he had ye kinge's proces for him, and showed him his warrant. 'Hast thou?' quoth Grey, and stoode stil awhile; but at length, catchinge ye fellowe by both ends of his collar before, held him fast, and drawinge out a great rundagger, brake his head in two or three places."

Again, Dr. Grey "came one day at ye assizes, wheare ye sheriffe had some sixty men, and he wth his twenty sonnes, ye trustyest young gentlemen and of ye best sort and rancke, came and drancke in Dorchester before ye sheriffe, and bad who dare to touch him; and so after awhile blew his horn and came away." On the same terms who would not like to be a Dorsetshire physician?

In 1569 (vide "Roberts' History of the Southern Counties") Lyme had no medical practitioner. And at the beginning of the seventeenth century Sir Symonds D'Ewes was brought into the world at Coxden Hall, near Axminster, by a female practitioner, who deformed him for life by her clumsiness. Yet more, Mrs. D'Ewes set out with her infant for London, when the babe, unable to bear the jolting of the carriage, screamed itself into a violent illness, and had to be left behind at Dorchester under the care of another doctress—Mrs. Margaret Waltham. And two generations later, in 1665, the Rev. Giles Moore, of Essex, had to send twenty-five miles for an ordinary medical man, who was paid 12s. per visit, and the same distance for a physician, whose fee was £1—a second physician, who came and stayed two days, being paid £1 10s.

Of the country doctors of the middle and close of the last century, Dr. Slop is a fair specimen. They were a rude, vulgar, keen-witted set of men, possessing much the same sort of intelligence, and disfigured by the same kind of ignorance, as a country gentleman expects now to find in his farrier. They had to do battle with the village nurses at the best on equal terms, often at a disadvantage; masculine dignity and superior medical erudition being in many districts of less account than the force of old usage, and the sense of decorum that supported the lady practitioners. Mrs. Shandy had an express provision in her marriage settlement, securing her from the ignorance of country doctors. Of course, in respect to learning and personal acquirements, the rural practitioners, as a class, varied very much, in accordance with the intelligence and culture of the district in which their days were spent, with the class and character of their patients, and with their own connections and original social condition. On his Yorkshire living Sterne came in contact with a rought lot. The Whitworth Taylors were captains and leaders of the army in which Dr. Slop was a private. The original of the last-mentioned worthy was so ill-read that he mistook Lithopædii Senonensis Icon for the name of a distinguished surgical authority, and, under this erroneous impression, quoted Lithopædus Senonensis with the extreme of gravity.