A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

But the sunshine did not come to Mead. He attracted it. Polished, courtly, adroit, and of an equable temper, he seemed pleased with everybody, and so made everybody pleased with him. Throughout life he was a Whig—staunch and unswerving, notwithstanding the charges brought against him by obscure enemies of being a luke-warm supporter of the constitutional, and a subservient worshipper of the monarchical, party. And yet his intimate friends were of the adverse faction. The overbearing, insolent, prejudiced Radcliffe forgave him his scholarship and politics, and did his utmost to advance his interests.

Mead's family was a respectable one in Buckinghamshire. His father was a theological writer, and one of the two ministers of Stepney, but was ejected from his preferment for non-conformity on the 24th of August, 1662. Fortunately the dispossessed clerk had a private fortune on which to maintain his fifteen children, of whom Richard, the eleventh, was born on the eleventh of August, 1673. The first years of Richard's life were spent at Stepney, where the Rev. Matthew Mead continued to minister to a noncomformist congregation, keeping in house Mr. John Nesbitt, afterwards a conspicuous nonconformist minister, as tutor to his children. In 1683 or 1684, it being suspected that Mr. Mead was concerned in certain designs against the government, the worthy man had to quit his flock and escape from the emissaries of power to Holland. During the father's residence abroad, Richard was sent to a classical school kept in Clerkenwell Close, by the nonconformist, Thomas Singleton, who had formerly been second master of Eton. It was under this gentleman's tuition that the boy acquired a sound and extensive knowledge of Latin and Greek. In 1690 he went to Utrecht; and after studying there for three years, proceeded to Leyden, where he studied botany and physic. His academical studies concluded, he travelled with David Polhill and Dr. Thomas Pellet, afterwards President of the College of Physicians, through Italy, stopping at Florence, Padua, Naples, and Rome. In the middle of 1696 he returned to London, with stores of information, refined manners, and a degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Physic, conferred on him at Padua, on the sixteenth of August, 1695. Settling at Stepney, and uniting himself closely with the nonconformists, he commenced the practice of his profession, in which he rapidly advanced to success. On the ninth of May, 1703, before he was thirty years of age, he was chosen physician of St. Thomas's Hospital, in Southwark. On obtaining this preferment he took a house in Crutched Friars, and year by year increased the sphere of his operations. In 1711 he moved to Austin Friars, to the house just vacated by the death of Dr. Howe. The consequences of this step taught him the value, to a rising doctor, of a house with a good reputation. Many of Howe's patients had got into a habit of coming to the house as much as to the physician, and Mead was only too glad to feel their pulses and flatter them into good humour, sound health, and the laudable custom of paying double fees. He was appointed Lecturer on Anatomy to the Company of Barbers and Surgeons.

He kept himself well before the public, as an author, with his "Mechanical Account of Poisons," published in 1702; and his treatise (1704), "De Imperio Solis et Lunæ in Corpora humana, et Morbis inde oriundis." He became a member of the Royal Society; and, in 1707, he received his M.D. diploma from Oxford, and his admission to the fellowship of the College of Physicians.

It has already been stated how Radcliffe engaged to introduce Mead to his patients. When Queen Anne was on her death-bed, the young physician was of importance enough to be summoned to the couch of dying royalty. The physicians who surrounded the expiring queen were afraid to say what they all knew. The Jacobites wanted to gain time, to push off the announcement of the queen's state to the last possible moment, so that the Hanoverians should not be able to take steps for quietly securing the succession which they desired. Mead, however, was too earnest a Whig to sacrifice what he believed to be the true interests of the country to any considerations of the private advantage that might be derived by currying favour with the Tory magnates, who, hovering about the Court, were debating how they could best make their game. Possibly his hopes emboldened him to speak the truth. Anyhow, he declared, on his first visit, that the queen would not live an hour. Charles Ford, writing to Swift, said, "This morning when I went there before nine, they told me she was just expiring. That account continued above three hours, and a report was carried to town that she was actually dead. She was not prayed for even in her own chapel at St. James's; and, what is more infamous (!) stocks arose three per cent. upon it in the city. Before I came away, she had recovered a warmth in her breast and one of her arms; and all the doctors agreed she would, in all probability, hold out till to-morrow—except Mead, who pronounced, several hours before, she could not live two minutes, and seems uneasy it did not happen so." This was the tone universally adopted by the Jacobites. According to them, poor Queen Anne had hard measure dealt out to her by her physicians;—the Tory Radcliffe negatively murdered her by not saving her; the Whig Mead earnestly desired her death. Certainly the Jacobites had no reason to speak well of Mead, for the ready courage with which he stated the queen's demise to be at hand gave a disastrous blow to their case, and did much to seat George I. quietly on the throne. Miss Strickland observes, "It has always been considered that the prompt boldness of this political physician (i. e. Mead) occasioned the peaceable proclamation of George I. The queen's demise in one hour was confidently predicted by her Whig doctor. He was often taunted afterwards with the chagrin his countenance expressed when the royal patient, on being again blooded, recovered her speech and senses."

On the death of Radcliffe, the best part of his empire descended to Mead, who, having already reaped the benefit of occupying the nest which Howe vacated at the summons of death, wisely resolved to take possession of Radcliffe's vacated mansion in Bloomsbury Square. This removal from Austin Friars to the more fashionable quarter of town was effected without delay. Indeed, Radcliffe was not buried when Mead entered his house. As his practice lay now more in the West than the East end of town, the prosperous physician resigned his appointment at St. Thomas's, and, receiving the thanks of the grand committee for his services, was presented with the staff of a governor of the charity. Radcliffe's practice and house were not the only possessions of that sagacious practitioner which Mead contrived to acquire. Into his hands also passed the doctor's gold-headed cane of office. This wand became the property successively of Radcliffe, Askew, Pitcairn, and Baillie, the arms of all which celebrated physicians are engraved on its head. On the death of Dr. Baillie, Mrs. Baillie presented the cane, as an interesting professional relic, to the College of Physicians, in the library of which august and learned body it is now preserved. Some years since the late respected Dr. Macmichael made the adventures of this stick the subject of an agreeable little book, which was published under the title of "The Gold-Headed Cane."

The largest income Mead ever made in one year was £7000. For several years he received between £5000 and £6000 per annum. When the great depreciation of the currency is taken into account, one may affirm, with little fear of contradiction, that no living physician is at the present time earning as much. Mead, however, made his income without any avaricious or stingy practices. In every respect he displayed that generosity which has for generations been the glorious distinction of his profession. At home his fee was a guinea. When he visited a patient of good rank and condition, in consultation or otherwise, he expected to have two guineas, or even more. But to the apothecaries who waited on him at his coffee-houses, he charged (like Radcliffe) only half-a-guinea for prescriptions, written without seeing the patient. His evening coffee-house was Batson's, frequented by the profession even down to Sir William Blizard; and in the forenoons he received apothecaries at Tom's, near Covent Garden. In Mead's time the clergy, as a body, were unable to pay the demands which professional etiquette would have required the physician to make on them if he had any. It is still the humane custom of physicians and eminent surgeons not to accept fees from curates, half-pay officers in the army and navy, and men of letters; and no one has more reason than the writer of these pages to feel grateful for the delicacy with which they act on this rule, and the benevolent zeal with which they seem anxious to drown the sense of obligation (which a gratuitous patient necessarily experiences) in increased attention and kindness, as if their good deeds were a peculiar source of pleasure to themselves.

But in the last century the beneficed clergy were in a very different pecuniary condition from that which they at present enjoy. Till the Tithe Communication Act passed, the parson (unless he was a sharp man of business, shrewd and unscrupulous as a horse-jobber, and ready to have an unintermittent war with his parishioners) never received anything like what he was entitled to of the produce of the land. Often he did not get half his dues; and even when he did obtain a fair tithe, his receipts were small compared with what his successor in the present generation has from the same source. Agriculture was then in such a backward state, and land was so ill-cultivated, that the rector of a large parish of good land was justly entitled only to a sum that a modern rent-charge holder would regard with painful surprise if told that he might take nothing more for his share in the fruits of the earth. The beneficed clergy were a comparatively poor body. The curate perhaps was not in a worse state than he is in now, for the simple reason that a worse can hardly be. To add to the impoverished appearance of the clerical profession, there existed in every capital and country town the luckless nonconforming clergy, bereft of the emoluments of their vocation, and often reduced to a condition scarcely—if at all—removed from begging. The title of Reverend was still affixed to their names—their costume was still that of their order—and by large masses of the people they were regarded with more reverence and affection than the well-fed Vicars of Bray, who, with mealy mouths and elastic consciences, saw only the butter on one side of their bread, and not the dirt on the other. Archbishop Sancroft died on his little farm in Suffolk, having for years subsisted on about fifty pounds a-year. When such was the fate of an Archbishop of Canterbury, the straits to which the ejected vicars or disabled curates were brought can be imagined—but scarcely described. In the great towns these unfortunate gentlemen swarmed, gaining a wretched subsistence as ushers in schools, tutors, secretaries—not unfrequently as domestic servants.

In such a condition of the established church, the rule of never taking money from "the cloth" was almost invariably observed by the members of the medical profession.

Mead once—and only once—departed from this rule. Mr. Robert Leake, a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, called on the doctor and sought his advice. The patient's ill-health had been in a great degree effected by doctoring himself—that is, exhibiting, according to his own notions of medical practice, some of Dr. Cheyne's prescriptions.

"Do as I tell you," said Mead, "and I'll set you up again."