A Book About Doctors

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

But when once a superstitious regard was paid to the external marks of a natural object, it was a short and easy step to produce the semblances of the revered characters by an artificial process, and then bestow on them the reverential feelings which had previously been directed to their originals. The ordinary course taken by a superstition in its degradation is one where its first sentiment becomes lost to sight, and its form is dogmatically insisted on. It was so in that phase of feticism which consisted in the blind reliance put on artificial talismans and amulets. The original significance of the talisman—the truth which was embodied in it as the emblem of the unseen powers that had produced it, in accordance with natural operations—was forgotten. The rows of lines and scratches, and the variegations of its colour, were only thought of; and the cunning of man—ever ready to make a god for himself—was exerted to improve upon them. In the multitude of new devices came inscriptions of mystic numbers, strange signs, agglomerations of figures, and scraps from sacred rituals—Abraxas and Abracadabra, and the Fi-fo-fum nonsense of the later charms.

Creatures that were capable of detecting the influence of the planetary system on that portion of Nature which is unquestionably affected by it, and of imagining its presence in inanimate objects, which, to use cautious language, have never been proved by science to be sensible of such a power, of course magnified its consequences in all that related to the human intellect and character. The instant in which a man entered the world was regarded as the one when he was most susceptible. Indeed, a babe was looked upon as a piece of warm and pliant wax: and the particular planet which was in the ascendant when the nurse placed the new child of Adam amongst the people of earth stamped upon it a distinctive charactery. To be born under a particular star was then an expression that meant something. On the nature of the star it depended whether homunculus, squealing out its first agonies, was to be morose or gentle, patient or choleric, lively or saturnine, amorous or vindictive—a warrior or a poet—a dreamer or a man of action.

Laughing at the refinements of absurdity at which astrology had arrived in his day, the author of "Hudibras" says:—

"There's but the twinkling of a star
Between a man of peace and war;
A thief and justice, fool and knave,
A huffing officer and slave;
A crafty lawyer and a pickpocket,
A great philosopher and a blockhead;
A formal preacher and a player,
A learned physician and manslayer.
As if men from stars did suck
Old age, diseases, and ill-luck,
Wit, folly, honour, virtue, vice,
Travel and women, trade and dice;
And draw, with the first air they breathe,
Battle and murder, sudden death.
Are not these fine commodities
To be imported from the skies,
And vended here amongst the rabble
For staple goods and warrantable?"

Involved in this view of the universe was the doctrine that some exceptional individuals were born far superior to the mass of their fellow-creatures. Absurd as astrology was, still, its postulates having once been granted, the logic was unassailable which argued that those few on whose birth lucky stars had shone benignantly, had a destiny and an organization distinct from those of ordinary mortals. The dicta of modern liberalism, and the Transatlantic dogma that "all men are by nature born equal," would have appeared to an orthodox believer in this planetary religion nothing better than the ravings of madness or impiety. Monarchs of men, whatever lowly station they at first occupied in life, were exalted above others because they possessed a distinctive excellence imparted to them at the hour of birth by the silent rulers of the night. It was useless to strive against such authority. To contend with it would have been to wrestle with the Almighty—ever present in his peculiarly favoured creatures.

Rulers being such, it was but natural for their servile worshippers to believe them capable of imparting to others, by a glance of the eye or a touch of the hand, an infinitesimal portion of the virtue that dwelt within them. To be favoured with their smiles was to bask in sunshine amid perfumes. To be visited with their frowns was to be chilled to the marrow, and feel the hail come down like keen arrows from an angry sky. To be touched by their robes was to receive new vigour. Hence came credence in the miraculous power of the imposition of royal, or otherwise sacred hands. Pyrrhus and Vespasian cured maladies by the touch of their fingers; and, long before and after them, earthly potentates and spiritual directors had, both in the East and the West, to prove their title to authority by displaying the same faculty.

In our own country more than in any other region of Christendom this superstition found supporters. From Edward the Confessor down to Queen Anne, who laid her healing hands on Samuel Johnson, it flourished; and it was a rash man who, trusting to the blind guidance of human reason dared to question that manifestation of the divinity which encircles kingship. Doubtless the gift of money made to each person who was touched did not tend to bring the cure into dis-esteem. It can be easily credited that, out of the multitude who flocked to the presence of Elizabeth and the Stuart kings for the benefit of their miraculous manipulations, there were many shrewd vagabonds who had more faith in the coin than in the touch bestowed upon them. The majority, however, it cannot be doubted, were as sincere victims of delusion as those who, at the close of the last century, believed in the efficacy of metallic tractors, and those who now unconsciously expose their intellectual infirmity as advocates of electro-biology and spirit-rapping. The populace, as a body, unhesitatingly believed that their sovereigns possessed this faculty as the anointed of the Lord. A story is told of a Papist, who, much to his astonishment, was cured of the king's evil by Elizabeth, after her final rupture with the court of Rome.

"Now I perceive," cried the man, "by plain experience that the excommunication against the Queen is of no effect, since God hath blessed her with such a gift."

Nor would it be wise to suppose that none were benefited by the treatment. The eagerness with which the vulgar crowd to a sight, and the intense excitement with which London mobs witness a royal procession to the houses of Parliament, or a Lord Mayor's pageant on its way from the City to Westminster, may afford us some idea of the inspiriting sensations experienced by a troop of wretches taken from their kennels to Whitehall, and brought into personal contact with their sovereign—their ideal of grandeur! Such a trip was a stimulus to the nervous system, compared with which the shock of a galvanic battery would have been but the tickling of a feather. And, over and above this, was the influence of imagination, which in many ways may become an agent for restoring the tone of the nervous system, and so enabling Nature to overcome the obstacles of her healthy action.

Montaigne admirably treated this subject in his essay, "Of the Force of Imagination"; and his anecdote of the happy results derived by an unfortunate nobleman from the use of a flat gold plate, graven with celestial figures, must have occurred to many of his readers who have witnessed the beneficial effects which are frequently produced by the practices of quackery.