Res fisci est, ubicunque natat. Whatsoever swims upon any water, belongs to this exchequer.
JEREMY TAYLOR. Preface to the Duct. Dub..
Some Dr. Moreton is said to have advanced this extraordinary opinion in a treatise upon the beauty of the human structure, that had the calf of the leg been providentially set before, instead of being preposterously placed behind, it would have been evidently better, for as much as the shin-bone could not then have been so easily broken.
I have no better authority for this than a magazine extract. But there have been men of science silly enough to entertain opinions quite as absurd, and presumptuous enough to think themselves wiser than their Maker.
Supposing the said Dr. Moreton has not been unfairly dealt with in this statement, it would have been a most appropriate reward for his sagacity if some one of the thousand and one wonder-working Saints of the Pope's Calendar had reversed his own calves for him, placed them in front, conformably to his own notion of the fitness of things, and then left him to regulate their motions as well as he could. The Gastrocnemius and the Solæus would have found themselves in a new and curious relation to the Rectus femoris and the two Vasti, and the anatomical reformer would have learnt feelingly to understand the term of antagonizing muscles in a manner peculiar to himself.
The use to which this notable philosopher would have made the calf of the leg serve, reminds me of a circumstance that occurred in our friend's practice. An old man hard upon threescore and ten, broke his shin one day by stumbling over a chair; and although a hale person who seemed likely to attain a great age by virtue of a vigorous constitution, which had never been impaired through ill habits or excesses of any kind, the hurt that had been thought little of at first became so serious in its consequences, that a mortification was feared. Daniel Dove was not one of those practitioners who would let a patient die under their superintendence secundum artem, rather than incur the risque of being censured for trying in desperate cases any method not in the regular course of practise: and recollecting what he had heard when a boy, that a man whose leg and life were in danger from just such an accident, had been saved by applying yeast to the wound, he tried the application. The dangerous symptoms were presently removed by it; a kindly process was induced, the wound healed, and the man became whole again.
Dove was then a young man; and so many years have elapsed since old Joseph Todhunter was gathered to his fathers, that it would now require an antiquarian's patience to make out the letters of his name upon his mouldering headstone. All remembrance of him (except among his descendants, if any there now be) will doubtless have past away, unless he should be recollected in Doncaster by the means which Dr. Dove devised for securing him against another such accident.
The Doctor knew that the same remedy was not to be relied on a second time, when there would be less ability left in the system to second its effect. He knew that in old age the tendency of Nature is to dissolution, and that accidents which are trifling in youth, or middle age, become fatal at a time when Death is ready to enter at any breach and Life to steal out through the first flaw in its poor crazy tenement. So, having warned Todhunter of this, and told him that he was likely to enjoy many years of life, if he kept a whole skin on his shins, he persuaded him to wear spatterdashes, quilted in front and protected there with whalebone, charging him to look upon them as the most necessary part of his clothing, and to let them be the last things which he doffed at night, and the first which he donn'd in the morning.
The old man followed this advice; lived to the great age of eighty-five, enjoyed his faculties to the last; and then died so easily, that it might truly be said he fell asleep.