"By-the-by," asked the patient, as his arm was being adroitly bound up, "do you go down to the House to-day?"
"I had not intended going," answered the noble operator, "not being sufficiently informed on the question which is to be debated; but you, that have considered it, which side will you vote on?"
In reply, Lord Chesterfield unfolded his view of the case; and Lord Radnor was so delighted with the reasoning of the man (who held his surgical powers in such high estimation), that he forthwith promised to support the wily earl's side in the division.
"I have shed my blood for the good of my country," said Lord Chesterfield that evening to a party of friends, who, on hearing the story, were convulsed with laughter.
Steele tells of a phlebotomist who advertised, for the good of mankind, to bleed at "threepence per head." Trade competition has, however, induced practitioners to perform the operation even without "the threepence." In the Stamford Mercury for March 28, 1716, the following announcement was made:—"Whereas the majority of apothecaries in Boston have agreed to pull down the price of bleeding to sixpence, let these certifie that Mr Clarke, apothecary, will bleed anybody at his shop gratis."
The readers of Smollett may remember in one of his novels the story of a gentleman, who, falling down in his club in an apoplectic fit, was immediately made the subject of a bet between two friendly bystanders. The odds were given and accepted against the sick man's recovery, and the wager was duly registered, when a suggestion was made by a more humane spectator that a surgeon ought to be sent for. "Stay," exclaimed the good fellow interested in having a fatal result to the attack, "if he is let blood, or interfered with in any way, the bet doesn't hold good." This humorous anecdote may be found related as an actual occurrence in Horace Walpole's works. It was doubtless one of the "good stories" current in society, and was so completely public property, that the novelist deemed himself entitled to use it as he liked. In certain recent books of "ana" the incident is fixed on Sheridan and the Prince Regent, who are represented as the parties to the bet.
Elsewhere mention has been made of a thousand pounds ordered to be paid Sir Edmund King for promptly bleeding Charles the Second. A nobler fee was given by a French lady to a surgeon, who used his lancet so clumsily that he cut an artery instead of a vein, in consequence of which the lady died. On her death-bed she, with charming humanity and irony, made a will, bequeathing the operator a life annuity of eight hundred livres, on condition "that he never again bled anybody so long as he lived." In the Journal Encylopédique of Jan. 15, 1773, a somewhat similar story is told of a Polish princess, who lost her life in the same way. In her will, made in extremis, there was the following clause:—"Convinced of the injury that my unfortunate accident will occasion to the unhappy surgeon who is the cause of my death, I bequeath to him a life annuity of two hundred ducats, secured by my estate, and forgive his mistake from my heart: I wish this may indemnify him for the discredit which my sorrowful catastrophe will bring upon him."
A famous French Maréchal reproved the clumsiness of a phlebotomist in a less gratifying manner. Drawing himself away from the bungling operator, just as the incision was about to be made, he displayed an unwillingness to put himself further in the power of a practitioner, who, in affixing the fillet, had given him a blow with the elbow in the face.
"My Lord," said the surgeon, "it seems that you are afraid of the bleeding."
"No," returned the Maréchal, "not of the bleeding—but the bleeder."