Dr. Beddoes was so stout that the Clifton ladies used to call him their "walking feather-bed."
Dr. Flemyng weighed twenty stone and eleven pounds, till he reduced his weight by abstinence from the delicacies of the table, and by taking a quarter of an ounce of common Castile soap every night.
Dr. Cheyne's weight was thirty-two stone, till he cured himself by persevering in a temperate diet. Laughing at two unwieldly noblemen whose corpulence was the favourite jest of all the wits in the court, Louis XV. said to one of them, "I suppose you take little or no exercise."
"Your Majesty will pardon me," replied the bulky duke, "for I generally walk two or three times round my cousin every morning."
Sir Theodore Mayerne, who, though he was the most eminent physician of his time, did not disdain to write "Excellent and Well-Approved Receipts in Cookery, with the best way of Preserving," was killed by tavern wine. He died, after returning from supper in a Strand hotel; his immediate friends attributing his unexpected death to the quality of the beverage, but others, less charitable, setting it down to the quantity.
Not many years ago, about a score surgeons were dining together at a tavern, when, about five minutes after some very "particular port" had been sent round for the first time, they all fell back in their chairs, afflicted in various degrees with sickness, vertigo, and spasm. A more pleasant sight for the waiters can hardly be conceived. One after one the gentlemen were conveyed to beds or sofas. Unfortunately for the startling effect which the story would otherwise have produced, they none of them expired. The next day they remembered that, instead of relishing the "particular port," they had detected a very unpleasant smack in it. The black bottles were demanded from the trembling landlord, when chemical analysis soon discovered that they had been previously used for fly-poison, and had not been properly cleansed. A fine old crust of such a kind is little to be desired.
It would perhaps have been well had old Butler (mentioned elsewhere in these volumes) met with a similar mishap, if it had only made him a less obstinate frequenter of beer-shops. He loved tobacco, deeming it
"A physician
Good both for sound and sickly;
'Tis a hot perfume
That expels cold Rheume,
And makes it flow down quickly."
It is on record that he made one of his patients smoke twenty-five pipes at a sitting. But fond though he was of tobacco, he was yet fonder of beer. He invented a drink called "Butler's Ale," afterwards sold at the Butler's Head, in Mason's Alley, Basinghall Street. Indeed, he was a sad old scamp. Nightly he would go to the tavern, and drink deeply for hours, till his maid-servant, old Nell, came between nine and ten o'clock and fetched him home, scolding him all the way for being such a sot. But though Butler liked ale and wine for himself, he thought highly of water for other people. When he occupied rooms in the Savoy, looking over the Thames, a gentleman afflicted with an ague came to consult him. Butler tipped the wink to his servants, who flung the sick man, in the twinkling of an eye, slap out of the window into the river. We are asked to believe that "the surprise absolutely cured" the patient of his malady.
The physicians of Charles the Second's day were jolly fellows. They made deep drinking and intrigue part of their profession as well as of their practice. Their books contain arguments in favour of indulgence, which their passions suggested and the taste of the times approved. Tobias Whitaker and John Archer, both physicians in ordinary to the merry monarch, were representative men of their class. Whitaker, a Norfolk man, practised with success at Norwich before coming up to London. He published a discourse upon waters, that proved him very ignorant on the subject; and a treatise on the properties of wine, that is a much better testimony to the soundness of his understanding. Prefixed to his "Elenchus of opinions on Small-Pox," is a portrait that represents him as a well-looking fellow. That he was a sincere and discerning worshipper of Bacchus, is shown by his "Tree of Humane Life, or the Bloud of the Grape. Proving the possibilitie of maintaining humane life from infancy to extreame old age without any sicknesse by the use of Wine." In this work (sold, by the way, in the author's shop, Pope's Head Alley) we read of wine,—"This is the phisick that doth not dull, but sets a true edge upon nature, after operation leaveth no venomous contact. Sure I am this was ancient phisick, else what meant Avicenna, Rhasis, and Averroes, to move the body twice every month with the same; as it is familiar to Nature, so they used it familiarly. As for my own experience, though I have not lived yet so long as to love excesse, yet have I seene such powerful effects, both on my selfe and others, as if I could render no other reason, they were enough to persuade me of its excellencie, seeing extenuate withered bodies by it caused to be faire, fresh, plumpe, and fat, old and infirme to be young and sound, when as water or small-beer drinkers looke like apes rather than men."