A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

"What makes the man greet?" asked Garth of a bystander.

"By my faith," was the answer, "and you too would greet if you were in his place and had as little to say."

"Come along, my dear fellow," responded Garth to his new acquaintance, "and dine with me. You are too good a fellow to be here."

At the Kit-Kat he once stayed to drink long after he had said that he must be off to see his patients. Sir Richard, more humane than the physician, or possibly, like the rest of the world, not disinclined to be virtuous at another's expense, observed, "Really, Garth, you ought to have no more wine, but be off to see those poor devils."

"It's no great matter," Garth replied, "whether I see them to-night or not, for nine of them have such bad constitutions, that all the physicians in the world can't save them; and the other six have such good constitutions, that all the physicians in the world can't kill them."

Born of a respectable north-country family, Garth was educated first at a provincial school, and then at Cambridge. He was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians on June 26, 1692, just when the quarrel of the Physicians and Apothecaries was waxing to its hottest, i. e. between the College edict of 1687, ordaining gratuitous advice, and the creation of the dispensary in 1696. As a young man he saw that his right place was with the dispensarians—and he took it. For a time his great poem, "The Dispensary," covered the apothecaries and anti-dispensarians with ridicule. It rapidly passed through numerous editions—in each of which, as was elegantly observed, the world lost and gained much. To say that of all the books, pamphlets, and broad-sheets thrown out by the combatants on both sides, it is by far the one of the greatest merit, would be scant justice, when it might almost be said that it is the only one of them that can now be read by a gentleman without a sense of annoyance and disgust. There is no point of view from which the medical profession appears in a more humiliating and contemptible light than that which the literature of this memorable squabble presents to the student. Charges of ignorance, dishonesty, and extortion were preferred on both sides; and the dispensarian physicians did not hesitate to taunt their brethren of the opposite camp with playing corruptly into the hands of the apothecaries—prescribing enormous and unnecessary quantities of medicine, so that the drug-venders might make heavy bills, and, as a consequence, recommend in all directions such complacent superiors to be called in. Garth's poem, unfair and violent though it is, seldom offends against decency. As a work of art it cannot be ranked high, and is now deservedly forgotten, although it has many good lines, and some felicitous satire. Johnson rightly pointed to the secret of its success, though he took a one-sided and unjust view of the dissensions which called it forth. "The poem," observes the biographer, "as its subject was present and popular, co-operated with passions and prejudices then prevalent; and, with such auxiliaries to its intrinsic merit, was universally and liberally applauded. It was on the side of charity against the intrigues of interest, and of regular learning against licentious usurpation of medical authority."

Sir Samuel Garth (knighted by the sword of Marlborough) died January 18, 1718-19, and was buried at Harrow-on-the-Hill.

But he lived to see the apothecaries gradually emancipate themselves from the ignominious regulations to which they consented, when their vocation was first separated from the grocery trade. Four years after his death they obtained legal acknowledgment of their right to dispense and sell medicines without the prescription of a physician; and six years later the law again decided in their favour, with regard to the physicians' right of examining and condemning their drugs. In 1721, Mr. Rose, an apothecary, on being prosecuted by the College for prescribing as well as compounding medicines, carried the matter into the House of Lords, and obtained a favourable decision. And from 1727, in which year Mr. Goodwin, an apothecary, obtained in a court of law a considerable sum for an illegal seizure of his wares (by Drs. Arbuthnot, Bale, and Levit), the physicians may be said to have discontinued to exercise their privileges of inspection.

Arbuthnot did not exceed Garth in love to the apothecaries. His contempt for, and dislike of, the fraternity, inspired him to write his "Essay on an Apothecary." He thinks it a pity that, to prevent the country from being overrun with apothecaries, it should not be allowed to anatomize them, for the improvement of natural knowledge. He ridicules them for pedantically "dressing all their discourse in the language of the Faculty."

"At meals," he says, "they distributed their wine with a little lymph, dissected a widgeon, cohobated their pease-porridge, and amalgamated a custard. A morsel of beef was a bolus; a grillard was sacrificed; eating was mastication and deglutition; a dish of steaks was a compound of many powerful ingredients; and a plate of soup was a very exalted preparation. In dress, a suit of cloaths was a system, a loophole a valve, and a surtout an integument. Cloth was a texture of fibres spread into a drab or kersey; a small rent in it was cutaneous; a thread was a filament; and the waistband of the breeches the peritoneum."