A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

Gibbons was not the only dangerous antagonist that Radcliffe did battle with in London. Dr. Whistler, Sir Edmund King, Sir Edward Hannes, and Sir Richard Blackmore were all strong enough to hurt him and rouse his jealousy. Hannes, also an Oxford man, was to the last a dangerous and hated rival. He opened his campaign in London with a carriage and four horses. The equipage was so costly and imposing that it attracted the general attention of the town. "By Jove! Radcliffe," said a kind friend, "Hannes's horses are the finest I have ever seen." "Umph!" growled Radcliffe savagely, "then he'll be able to sell them for all the more."

To make his name known Hannes used to send his liveried footmen running about the streets with directions to put their heads into every coach they met and inquire, with accents of alarm, if Dr. Hannes was in it. Acting on these orders, one of his fellows, after looking into every carriage between Whitehall and the Royal Exchange, without finding his employer, ran up Exchange Alley into Garraway's Coffee-house, which was one of the great places of meeting for the members of the medical profession. (Apothecaries used regularly to come and consult the physicians, while the latter were over their wine, paying only half fees for the advice so given, without the patients being personally examined. Batson's coffee-house in Corn-hill was another favourite spot for these Galenic re-unions, Sir William Blizard being amongst the last of the medical authorities who frequented that hostelry for the purpose of receiving apothecaries.) "Gentlemen, can your honours tell me if Dr. Hannes is here?" asked the man, running into the very centre of the exchange of medicine-men. "Who wants Dr. Hannes, fellow?" demanded Radcliffe, who happened to be present. "Lord A—— and Lord B——, your honour!" answered the man. "No, no, friend," responded the doctor slowly, and with pleasant irony, "you are mistaken. Those lords don't want your master—'tis he who wants them."

But Hannes made friends and a fine income, to the deep chagrin of his contemptuous opponent. An incessant feud existed between the two men. The virulence of their mutual animosity may be estimated by the following story. When the poor little Duke of Gloucester was taken ill, Sir Edward Hannes and Blackmore (famous as Sir Richard Blackmore, the poet) were called in to attend him. On the case taking a fatal turn, Radcliffe was sent for; and after roundly charging the two doctors with the grossest mismanagement of a simple attack of rash, went on, "It would have been happy for this nation had you, sir, been bred up a basket-maker—and you, sir, had remained a country schoolmaster, rather than have ventured out of your reach, in the practice of an art which you are an utter stranger to, and for your blunders in which you ought to be whipped with one of your own rods." The reader will not see the force of this delicate speech if he is not aware that Hannes was generally believed to be the son of a basket-maker, and Sir Richard Blackmore had, in the period of his early poverty, like Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, been a teacher of boys. Whenever the "Amenities of the Faculty" come to be published, this consultation, on the last illness of Jenkin Lewis's little friend, ought to have its niche in the collection.

Towards the conclusion of his life, Radcliffe said that, "when a young practitioner, he possessed twenty remedies for every disease; and at the close of his career he found twenty diseases for which he had not one remedy." His mode of practice, however, as far as anything is known about it, at the outset was the same as that which he used at the conclusion of his career. Pure air, cleanliness, and a wholesome diet were amongst his most important prescriptions; though he was so far from running counter to the interests of the druggists, that his apothecary, Dandridge, whose business was almost entirely confined to preparing the doctor's medicines, died worth 50,000l. For the imaginary maladies of his hypochondriacal male and fanciful female patients he had the greatest contempt, and neither respect for age or rank, nor considerations of interest, could always restrain him from insulting such patients. In 1686 he was appointed physician to Princess Anne of Denmark, and was for some years a trusted adviser of that royal lady; but he lacked the compliant temper and imperturbable suavity requisite for a court physician. Shortly after the death of Queen Mary, the Princess Anne, having incurred a fit of what is by the vulgar termed "blue devils," from not paying proper attention to her diet, sent in all haste to her physician. Radcliffe, when he received the imperative summons to hurry to St. James's was sitting over his bottle in a tavern. The allurements of Bacchus were too strong for him, and he delayed his visit to the distinguished sufferer. A second messenger arrived, but by that time the physician was so gloriously ennobled with claret, that he discarded all petty considerations of personal advantage, and flatly refused to stir an inch from the room where he was experiencing all the happiness humanity is capable of. "Tell her Royal Highness," he exclaimed, banging his fist on the table, "that her distemper is nothing but the vapours. She's in as good state of health as any woman breathing—only she can't make up her mind to believe it."

The next morning prudence returned with sobriety; and the doctor did not fail to present himself at an early hour in the Princess's apartment in St. James's Palace. To his consternation he was stopped in the ante-room by an officer, and informed that he was dismissed from his post, which had already been given to Dr. Gibbons. Anne never forgave the sarcasm about "the vapours." It so rankled in her breast, that, though she consented to ask for the Doctor's advice both for herself and those dear to her, she never again held any cordial communication with him. Radcliffe tried to hide the annoyance caused him by his fall, in a hurricane of insolence towards his triumphant rival: Nurse Gibbons had gotten a new nursery—Nurse Gibbons was not to be envied his new acquisition—Nurse Gibbons was fit only to look after a woman who merely fancied herself ill.

Notwithstanding this rupture with the Court, Radcliffe continued to have the most lucrative practice in town, and in all that regarded money he was from first to last a most lucky man. On coming to town he found Lower, the Whig physician, sinking in public favour—and Thomas Short, the Roman Catholic doctor, about to drop into the grave. Whistler, Sir Edmund King, and Blackmore had plenty of patients. But there was a "splendid opening," and so cleverly did Radcliffe slip into it, that at the end of his first year in town he got twenty guineas per diem. The difference in the value of money being taken into consideration, it may be safely affirmed that no living physician makes more. Occasionally the fees presented to him were very large. He cured Bentinck, afterwards Earl of Portland, of a diarrhœa, and Zulestein, afterwards Earl of Rochford, of an attack of congestion of the brain. For these services William III. presented him with 500 guineas out of the privy-purse, and offered to appoint him one of his physicians, with £200 per annum more than he gave any other of his medical officers. Radcliffe pocketed the fee, but his Jacobite principles precluded him from accepting the post. William, however, notwithstanding the opposition of Bidloe and the rest of his medical servants, held Radcliffe in such estimation that he continually consulted him; and during the first eleven years of his reign paid him, one year with another, 600 guineas per annum. And when he restored to health William, Duke of Gloucester (the Princess of Denmark's son), who in his third year was attacked with severe convulsions, Queen Mary sent him, through the hand of her Lord Chamberlain, 1000 guineas. And for attending the Earl of Albemarle at Namur he had 400 guineas and a diamond ring, 1200 guineas from the treasury, and an offer of a baronetcy from the King.

For many years he was the neighbour of Sir Godfrey Kneller, in Bow Street. A dispute that occurred between the two neighbours and friends is worth recording. Sir Godfrey took pleasure in his garden, and expended large sums of money in stocking it with exotic plants and rare flowers. Radcliffe also enjoyed a garden, but loved his fees too well to expend them on one of his own. He suggested to Sir Godfrey that it would be a good plan to insert a door into the boundary wall between their gardens, so that on idle afternoons, when he had no patients to visit, he might slip into his dear friend's pleasure-grounds. Kneller readily assented to this proposition, and ere a week had elapsed the door was ready for use. The plan, however, had not been long acted on when the painter was annoyed by Radcliffe's servants wantonly injuring his parterres. After fruitlessly expostulating against these depredations, the sufferer sent a message to his friend, threatening, if the annoyance recurred, to brick up the wall. "Tell Sir Godfrey," answered Radcliffe to the messenger, "that he may do what he likes to the door, so long as he does not paint it." When this vulgar jeer was reported to Kneller, he replied, with equal good humour and more wit, "Go back and give my service to Dr. Radcliffe, and tell him, I'll take anything from him—but physic."

Radcliffe was never married, and professed a degree of misogyny that was scarcely in keeping with his conduct on certain occasions. His person was handsome and imposing, but his manners were little calculated to please women. Overbearing, truculent, and abusive, he could not rest without wounding the feelings of his companions with harsh jokes. Men could bear with him, but ladies were like Queen Anne in vehemently disliking him. King William was not pleased with his brutal candour in exclaiming, at the sight of the dropsical ancles uncovered for inspection, "I would not have your Majesty's legs for your three kingdoms"; but William's sister-in-law repaid a much slighter offence with life-long animosity. In 1693, however, the doctor made an offer to a citizen's daughter, who had beauty and a fortune of £15,000. As she was only twenty-four years of age, the doctor was warmly congratulated by his friends when he informed them that he, though well advanced in middle age, had succeeded in his suit. Before the wedding-day, however, it was discovered that the health of the lady rendered it incumbent on her honour that she should marry her father's book-keeper. This mishap soured the doctor's temper to the fair sex, and his sarcasms at feminine folly and frailty were innumerable.

He was fond of declaring that he wished for an Act of Parliament entitling nurses to the sole and entire medical care of women. A lady who consulted him about a nervous singing in the head was advised to "curl her hair with a ballad." His scorn of women was not lessened by the advances of certain disorderly ladies of condition, who displayed for him that morbid passion which medical practitioners have often to resist in the treatment of hysterical patients. Yet he tried his luck once again at the table of love. "There's no fool so great as an old fool." In the summer of 1709, Radcliffe, then in his sixtieth year, started a new equipage; and having arrayed himself in the newest mode of foppery, threw all the town into fits of laughter by paying his addresses, with the greatest possible publicity, to a lady who possessed every requisite charm—(youth, beauty, wealth)—except a tenderness for her aged suitor. Again was there an unlucky termination to the doctor's love, which Steele, in No. 44 of The Tatler, ridiculed in the following manner:—

"This day, passing through Covent Garden, I was stopped in the Piazza by Pacolet, to observe what he called The Triumph of Love and Youth. I turned to the object he pointed at, and there I saw a gay gilt chariot, drawn by fresh prancing horses, the coachman with a new cockade, and the lacqueys with insolence and plenty in their countenances. I asked immediately, 'What young heir, or lover, owned that glittering equipage!' But my companion interrupted, 'Do not you see there the mourning Æsculapius?' 'The mourning!' said I. 'Yes, Isaac,' said Pacolet, 'he is in deep mourning, and is the languishing, hopeless lover of the divine Hebe, the emblem of Youth and Beauty. That excellent and learned sage you behold in that furniture is the strongest instance imaginable that love is the most powerful of all things.