MEDICAL ABUSES.
The neglect of well-supported, well-regulated hospitals, has recoiled on the Spaniards. The rising profession are deprived of the advantages of walking them, and thus beholding every nice difficulty solved by experienced masters. Recently some efforts have been made in large towns, especially on the coasts, to introduce reforms and foreign ameliorations; but official jobbing and ignorant routine are still among the diseases that are not cured in Spain. In 1811, when the English army was at Cadiz, a physician, named Villarino, urged by some of our indignant surgeons, brought the disgraceful condition of Spanish hospitals before the Cortes. A commission was appointed, and their sad report, still extant, details how the funds, food, wine, &c., destined for the patients were consumed by the managers and their subalterns. The results were such as might be expected; the authorities held together, and persecuted Villarino as a revolucionario, or reformer, and succeeded in disgracing him. The superintendent of this establishment was the notorious Lozano de Torres, who starved the English army after Talavera, and was “a thief and a liar,” in the words of the Duke. The Regency, after this very exposure of his hospital, promoted him to the civil government of Old Castile; and Ferdinand VII., in 1817, made him Minister of Justice.
As buildings, the hospitals are generally very large; but the space is as thinly tenanted as the unpeopled wastes of Spain. In England wards are wanting for patients—in Spain, patients for wards. The names of some of the greatest hospitals are happily chosen; that of Seville, for instance, is called La Sangre, the blood, or Las Cinco Llagas, the five bleeding wounds of our Saviour, which are sculptured over the portal like bunches of grapes. Blood is an ominous name for this house and home of Sangrado, where the lancet, like the Spanish knife, gives no quarter. In instruments of life and death, this establishment resembled a Spanish arsenal, being wanting in everything at the critical moment; its dispensary, as in the shop of Shakspere’s apothecary, presented a beggarly account of empty pill-boxes, while as to a visiting Brodie, the part of that Hamlet was left out. The grand hospital at Madrid is called el general, the General, and the medical assistance is akin to the military co-operation of such Spanish generals as Lapeña and Venegas, who in the moment of need left Graham at Barrosa, and the Duke at Talavera, without a shadow of aid. There is nothing new in this, if the old proverb tells truth, socorros de España, o tarde o nunca; Spanish succours arrive late or never. In cases of battle, war, and sudden death as in peace, the professional men, military or medical, are apt to assist in the meaning of the French word assister, which signifies to be present without taking any part in what is going on. And this applies, where knocks on the head are concerned, not to the medical men only, but to the universal Spanish nation; when any one is stabbed in the streets, he will infallibly bleed to death, unless the authorities arrive in time to pick him up, and to bind up his wounds: every one else—Englishmen excepted, we describe things witnessed—passes on the other side; not from any fear at the sight of blood, nor abhorrence of murder, but from the dread which every Spaniard feels at the very idea of getting entangled in the meshes of La Justicia, whose ministers lay hold of all who interfere or are near the body as principals or witnesses, and Spanish justice, if once it gets a man into its fangs, never lets him go until drained of his last farthing.
COLLEGE OF SAN CARLOS.
The schools and hospitals, especially in the inland remote cities, are very deficient in all improved mechanical appliances and modern discoveries, and the few which are to be met with are mostly of French and second-rate manufacture. It is much the same with their medical treatises and technical works; all is a copy, and a bad one; it has been found to be much easier to translate and borrow, than to invent; therefore, as in modern art and literature, there is little originality in Spanish medicine. It is chiefly a veneering of other men’s ideas, or an adaptation of ancient and Moorish science. Most of their terms of medicinal art, as well as of drugs, jalea, elixir, jarave, rob, sorbete, julepe, &c., are purely Arabic, and indicate the sources from whence the knowledge was obtained, for there is no surer historical test than language of the origin from whence the knowledge of the science was derived with its phraseology; and whenever Spaniards depart from the daring ways of their ancestors, it is to adopt a timid French system. The few additions to their medical libraries are translations from their neighbours, just as the scanty materia medica in their apothecaries’ shops is rendered more dangerous and ineffective by quack nostrums from Paris. It is a serious misfortune to sanative science in the Peninsula, that all that is known of the works of thoughtful, careful Germany, of practical, decided England, is passed through the unfair, inaccurate alembic of French translation; thus the original becomes doubly deteriorated, and the sacred cosmopolitan cause of truth and fact is too often sacrificed to the Gallic mania of suppressing both, for the honour of their own country. Can it be wondered, therefore, that the acquaintance of the Spanish faculty with modern works, inventions, and operations is very limited, or that their text-books and authorities should too often be still Galen, Celsus, Hippocrates, and Boerhaave? The names of Hunter, Harvey, and Astley Cooper, are scarcely more known among their M.D.’s than the last discoveries of Herschel; the light of such distant planets has not had time to arrive.
LUNATIC ASYLUMS.
To this day the Colegio de San Carlos, or the College of Surgeons at Madrid, relies much on teaching the obstetric art by means of wax preparations; but learning a trade on paper is not confined in Spain to medical students; the great naval school at Seville is dedicated to San Telmo, who, uniting in himself the attributes of the ancient Castor and Pollux, appears in storms at the mast-head in the form of lights to rescue seamen. Hence, whenever it comes on to blow, the pious crews of Spanish crafts fall on their knees, and depend on this marine Hercules, instead of taking in sail, and putting the helm up. Our tars, who love the sea propter se, for better for worse, having no San Telmo to help them in foul weather (although the somewhat irreverent gunner of the Victory did call him of Trafalgar Saint Nelson), go to work and perform the miracle themselves—aide toi, et le ciel t’aidera. In our time, the middies in this college were taught navigation in a room, from a small model of a three-decker placed on a large table; and thus at least they were not exposed to sea-sickness. The Infant Antonio, Lord High Admiral of Spain, was walking in the Retiro gardens near the pond, when it was proposed to cross in a boat; he declined, saying, “Since I sailed from Naples to Spain I have never ventured on water.” But, in this and some other matters, things are managed differently on the Thames and the Bætis. Thus, near Greenwich Hospital, a floating frigate, large as life, is the school of young chips of old blocks, who every day behold in the veterans of Cape St. Vincent and Trafalgar living examples of having “done their duty.” The evidence of former victories thus becomes a guarantee for the realization of their young hopes, and the future is assured by the past.
LUNATIC ASYLUMS.
Next to the barracks, prisons, arsenals, and fortresses of Spain, the establishments for suffering mortality are the least worth seeing, and are the most to be avoided by wise travellers, who can indulge in much better specimens at home. This assertion will be better understood by a sketch or two taken on the spot a few years ago. The so-called asylums for lunatics are termed in Spanish hospitales de locos, a word derived from the Arabic, locao, mad; they, like the cognate Morostans (μωρος) of Cairo, were generally so mismanaged, that the directors appeared to be only desirous of obtaining admission themselves. Insanity seemed to derange both the intellects of the patients and to harden the bowels of their attendants, while the usual misappropriation of the scanty funds produced a truly reckless, makeshift, wretched result. There was no attempt at classification, which indeed is no thing of Spain. The inmates were crowded together,—the monomaniac, the insane, the raving mad,—in one confusion of dirt and misery, where they howled at each other, chained like wild beasts, and were treated even worse than criminals, for the passions of the most outrageous were infuriated by the savage lash. There was not even a curtain to conceal the sad necessities of these human beings, then reduced to animals: everything was public even unto death, whose last groan was mingled with the frantic laugh of the surviving spectators. In some rare cases the bodies of those whose minds are a void, were confined in solitary cells, with no other companions save affliction. Of these, many, when first sent there by friends and relations to be put out of the way, were not mad, soon indeed to become so, as solitude, sorrow, and the iron entered their brain. These establishments, which the natives ought to hide in shame, were usually among the first lions which they forced on the stranger, and especially on the Englishman, since, holding our worthy countrymen to be all locos, they naturally imagined that they would be quite at home among the inmates.
They, in common with many others on the Continent, entertain a notion that all Britons bold have a bee in their bonnet; they think so on many, and perhaps not always unreasonable, grounds. They see them preferring English ways, sayings, and doings, to their own, which of itself appears to a Spaniard, as to a Frenchman, to be downright insanity. Then our countrymen tell the truth in bulletins, use towels, and remove superfluous hairs daily. And letting alone other minor exhibitions of eccentricity, are not the natives of England, Scotland, and Ireland guilty of three actions, any one of which would qualify for Bedlam if the Lord Chancellor were to issue a writ de lunatico inquiriendo?—have they not bled for Spain, in purse and person, on the battlefield, on the railroad, in the Stock Exchange?—