After all, supposing that the country surgeon were able to set a bone and sew up a wound, it was just as well that he did not employ the astounding medicines and follow the desperate practices in force in the medical profession at the end of last century and the beginning of this. Bleeding with lancet and with leeches, cupping, cauterising, blue-pill, et toujours blue-bill, were in vogue. Starving in fever—water-gruel administered where now is given extractum carnis, toast and water in place of beef-tea—the marvel is that our forefathers did not die off like flies under the treatment.
I remember saying to a yeoman in Essex one day: "What! nine—ten miles from a doctor?"
"Well, sir, yes; it is ten. Thank heaven we all in this parish mostly dies natural deaths."
And surely, under the bleeding and salivating and starving régime, the grave had more than her due, and the doctor was the High Priest of Mors Palida, who brought to the grim goddess her victims. An old sexton at Wakefield parish church was also a headstone cutter. He was not very exact in his orthography, but he had the gift of rhyme, and could compose metrical epitaphs, that, indeed, sometimes, like Orlando's verses, either halted, or had too many feet to run on. One day he was sitting chipping out an inscription on a headstone, when the surgeon rode up. The doctor drew rein and looked at the work of the sexton.
"Halloo!" said he. "Peter Priestley, you've made a blot there," meaning a mis-spelling.
"Have I, doctor?" answered the clerk, "cover it over. I've covered over many blots o' yours." The doctor rode on without another word.
But the village surgeon had not in old days the skilled nurse as his assistant: and it is now a recognized truth that, for the sick, the nurse is more important than the doctor. He sent his medicines, but how could he be sure that they were taken, or taken regularly? The whole system of nursing was as rude as the whole system of drainage. It was all happy-go-lucky. The story is well known of the doctor sending a bottle of mixture to a sick man, with the direction on it, "Before taken to be well shaken"—and finding on his arrival that the attendant had shaken up the patient pretty vigorously before administering the draught.
The following story is perfectly true.
A kind-hearted village doctor, finding that a poor woman he was attending needed nourishing food, got his wife to send her a jelly.