Previous to Charles II.'s reign physicians were in the habit of visiting their patients on horse-back, sitting sideways on foot-cloths like women. Simeon Fox and Dr. Argent were the last Presidents of the College of Physicians to go their rounds in this undignified manner. With the "Restoration" came the carriage of the London physician. The Lex Talionis says, "For there must now be a little coach and two horses; and, being thus attended, half-a-piece, their usual fee, is but ill-taken, and popped into their left pocket, and possibly may cause the patient to send for his worship twice before he will come again to the hazard of another angel."
The fashion, once commenced, soon prevailed. In Queen Anne's reign, no physician with the slightest pretensions to practice could manage without his chariot and four, sometimes even six, horses. In our own day an equipage of some sort is considered so necessary an appendage to a medical practitioner, that a physician without a carriage (or a fly that can pass muster for one) is looked on with suspicion. He is marked down mauvais sujet in the same list with clergymen without duty, barristers without chambers, and gentlemen whose Irish tenantry obstinately refuse to keep them supplied with money. On the whole the carriage system is a good one. It protects stair carpets from being soiled with muddy boots (a great thing!), and bears cruelly on needy aspirants after professional employment (a yet greater thing! and one that manifestly ought to be the object of all professional etiquette!). If the early struggles of many fashionable physicians were fully and courageously written, we should have some heart-rending stories of the screwing and scraping and shifts by which their first equipages were maintained. Who hasn't heard of the darling doctor who taught singing under the moustachioed and bearded guise of an Italian Count, at a young ladies' school at Clapham, in order that he might make his daily West-end calls between 3 p. m. and 6 p. m. in a well-built brougham drawn by a fiery steed from a livery stable? There was one noted case of a young physician who provided himself with the means of figuring in a brougham during the May-fair morning, by condescending to the garb and duties of a flyman during the hours of darkness. He used the same carriage at both periods of the four-and-twenty hours, lolling in it by daylight, and sitting on it by gaslight. The poor fellow forgetting himself on one occasion, so far as to jump in when he ought to have jumped on, or jump on when he ought to have jumped in, he published his delicate secret to an unkind world.
It is a rash thing for a young man to start his carriage, unless he is sure of being able to sustain it for a dozen years. To drop it is sure destruction. We remember an ambitious Phaeton of Hospitals who astonished the world—not only of his profession, but of all London—with an equipage fit for an ambassador—the vehicle and the steeds being obtained, like the arms blazoned on his panels, upon credit. Six years afterwards he was met by a friend crushing the mud on the Marylebone pavements, and with a characteristic assurance, that even adversity was unable to deprive him of, said that his health was so much deranged that his dear friend, Sir James Clarke, had prescribed continual walking exercise for him as the only means of recovering his powers of digestion. His friends—good-natured people, as friends always are—observed that "it was a pity Sir James hadn't given him the advice a few years sooner—prevention being better than cure."
Though physicians began generally to take to carriages in Charles II.'s reign, it may not be supposed that no doctor of medicine before that time experienced the motion of a wheeled carriage. In "Stowe's Survey of London" one may read:—
"In the year 1563, Dr. Langton, a physician, rid in a car, with a gown of damask, lined with velvet, and a coat of velvet, and a cap of the same (such, it seems, doctors then wore), but having a blue hood pinned over his cap; which was (as it seems) a customary mark of guilt. And so came through Cheapside on a market-day."
The doctor's offence was one against public morals. He had loved not wisely—but too well. The same generous weakness has brought learned doctors, since Langton's day, into extremely ridiculous positions.
The cane, wig, silk coat, stockings, side-saddle, and carriage, of the old physician have been mentioned. We may not pass over his muff in silence. That he might have his hands warm and delicate of touch, and so be able to discriminate to a nicety the qualities of his patient's arterial pulsations, he made his rounds, in cold weather, holding before him a large fur muff, in which his fingers and fore-arm were concealed.