CHAPTER CCXXXVII.
MORE MALADIES THAN THE BEST PHYSICIANS CAN PREVENT BY REMEDIES.—THE DOCTOR NOT GIVEN TO QUESTIONS, AND OF THE POCO-CURANTE SCHOOL AS TO ALL THE POLITICS OF THE DAY.
A slight answer to an intricate and useless question is a fit cover to such a dish; a cabbage leaf is good enough to cover a pot of mushrooms.
JEREMY TAYLOR.
Yet in his serious moods the Doctor sadly confessed with that Sir George, whom the Scotch ungratefully call Bloody Mackenzie, that “as in the body natural, so likewise in the politic, Nature hath provided more diseases than the best of Physicians can prevent by remedies.” He knew that kingdoms as well as individuals have their agues and calentures, are liable to plethora sometimes and otherwhiles to atrophy, to fits of madness which no hellebore can cure, and to decay and dissolution which no human endeavours can avert. With the maladies of the State indeed he troubled himself not, for though a true-born Englishman, he was as to all politics of the day, of the Poco-curante school. But with those of the human frame his thoughts were continually employed; it was his business to deal with them; his duty and his earnest desire to heal them, under God's blessing, where healing was humanly possible, or to alleviate them, when any thing more than alleviation was beyond the power of human skill.
The origin of evil was a question upon which he never ventured. Here too, he said with Sir George Mackenzie, “as I am not able by the Jacob's Ladder of my merit to scale Heaven, so am I less able by the Jacob's Staff of my private ability to take up the true altitude of its mysteries:” and borrowing a play upon words from the same old Essayist, he thought the brain had too little pia mater, which was too curious in such inquiries. But the mysteries of his own profession afforded “ample room and verge enough” for his speculations, however wide and wild their excursions. Those mysteries are so many, so momentous, and so inscrutable that he wondered not at any superstitions which have been excogitated by bewildered imagination, and implicitly followed by human weakness in its hopes and fears, its bodily and its mental sufferings.
As little did he wonder at the theories advanced by men who were in their days, the Seraphic and Angelic and Irrefragable Doctors of the healing art:—the tartar of Paracelsus, the Blas and Gas of Van Helmont, nor in later times at the animalcular hypotheses of Langius and Paullinus; nor at the belief of elder nations, as the Jews, and of savages every-where that all maladies are the immediate work of evil spirits. But when he called to mind the frightful consequences to which the belief of this opinion has led, the cruelties which have been exercised, the crimes which have been perpetrated, the miseries which have been inflicted and endured, it made him shudder at perceiving that the most absurd error may produce the greatest mischief to society, if it be accompanied with presumption, and if any real or imaginary interest be connected with maintaining it.
The Doctor like his Master and benefactor Peter Hopkins, was of the Poco-curante school in politics. He said that the Warwickshire gentleman who was going out with his hounds when the two armies were beginning to engage at Edge-hill, was not the worst Englishman who took the field that day.