Go to!
You are a subtile nation, you physicians,
And grown the only cabinets in court!
B. JONSON.
The Doctor, who was charitable in all his opinions, used to account and apologize for many of the errors of men, by what he called the original sin of their constitution, using the term not theologically, but in a physico-philosophical sense. What an old French physician said concerning Charles VIII. was in entire accord with his speculations,—ce corps etoit composé de mauvais pâte, et de matiere cathareuse. Men of hard hearts and heavy intellect, he said, were made of stony materials. For a drunkard, his qualifying censure was,—“poor fellow! bibulous clay—bibulous clay!” Your light-brained, light-hearted people, who are too giddy ever to be good, had not earth enough, he said, in their composition. Those upon whose ungrateful temper benefits were ill bestowed, and on whom the blessings of fortune were thrown away, he excused by saying that they were made from a sandy soil;—and for Mammon's muckworms,—their mould was taken from the dunghill.
Mason the poet was a man of ill-natured politics, out of humour with his country till the French Revolution startled him and brought him into a better state of feeling. This however was not while the Doctor lived, and till that time he could see nothing but tyranny and injustice in the proceedings of the British Government, and nothing but slavery and ruin to come for the nation. These opinions were the effects of Whiggery1 acting upon a sour stomach and a saturnine constitution. To think ill of the present and augur worse of the future has long been accounted a proof of patriotism among those who by an illustrious antiphrasis call themselves patriots. “What the Romans scorned to do after the battle of Cannæ,” said Lord Keeper Finch in one of his solid and eloquent speeches, “what the Venetians never did when they had lost all their terra firma, that men are now taught to think a virtue and the sign of a wise and good man, desperare de Republica: and all this in a time of as much justice and peace at home, as good laws for the security of religion and liberty, as good execution of these laws, as great plenty of trade and commerce abroad, and as likely a conjuncture of affairs for the continuance of these blessings to us, as ever nation prospered under.”
1 See Vol. IV. p. 375.
The Doctor, when he spoke of this part of Mason's character, explained it by saying that the elements had not been happily tempered in him—“cold and dry, Sir!” and then he shook his head and knit his brow with that sort of compassionate look which came naturally into his countenance when he was questioned concerning a patient whose state was unfavourable.
But though he believed that many of our sins and propensities are bred in the bone, he disputed the other part of the proverb, and maintained that they might be got out of the flesh. And then generalizing with a rapidity worthy of Humboldt himself, he asserted that all political evils in modern ages and civilized states were mainly owing to a neglect of the medical art;—and that there would not, and could not be so many distempers in the body politic, if the primæ viæ were but attended to with proper care; an opinion in which he was fortified by the authority of Sir William Temple.
“I have observed the fate of Campania,” says that eminent statesman, “determine contrary to all appearances, by the caution and conduct of a General, which was attributed by those that knew him, to his age and infirmities, rather than his own true qualities, acknowledged otherwise to have been as great as most men of the age. I have seen the counsels of a noble country grow bold, or timorous, according to the fits of his good or ill-health that managed them, and the pulse of the Government beat high with that of the Governor; and this unequal conduct makes way for great accidents in the world. Nay, I have often reflected upon the counsels and fortunes of the greatest monarchies rising and decaying sensibly with the ages and healths of the Princes and chief officers that governed them. And I remember one great minister that confessed to me, when he fell into one of his usual fits of the gout, he was no longer able to bend his mind or thought to any public business, nor give audiences beyond two or three of his domestics, though it were to save a kingdom; and that this proceeded not from any violence of pain, but from a general languishing and faintness of spirits, which made him in those fits think nothing worth the trouble of one careful or solicitous thought. For the approaches, or lurkings of the Gout, the Spleen, or the Scurvy, nay the very fumes of indigestion, may indispose men to thought and to care, as well as diseases of danger and pain. Thus accidents of health grow to be accidents of State, and public constitutions come to depend in a great measure upon those of particular men; which makes it perhaps seem necessary in the choice of persons for great employments (at least such as require constant application and pains) to consider their bodies as well as their minds, and ages and health as well as their abilities.”
Cervantes according to the Doctor clearly perceived this great truth, and went farther than Sir W. Temple, for he perceived also the practical application, though it was one of those truths which because it might have been dangerous for him to propound them seriously, he was fain to bring forward in a comic guise, leaving it for the wise to discover his meaning, and for posterity to profit by it. He knew—(Daniel loquitur) what did not Cervantes know?—that if Philip II. had committed himself to the superintendence of a Physician instead of a Father Confessor, many of the crimes and miseries by which his reign is so infamously distinguished, might have been prevented. A man of his sad spirit and melancholy complection to be dieted upon fish the whole forty days of Lent, two days in the week during the rest of the year, and on the eve of every holiday besides,—what could be expected but atrabilious thoughts, and cold-blooded resolutions? Therefore Cervantes appointed a Physician over Sancho in his Baratarian government: the humour of the scene was for all readers, the application for those who could penetrate beyond the veil, the benefit for happier ages when the art of Government should be better understood, and the science of medicine be raised to its proper station in the state.