If blinking nurses can’t the business do:
Write well the labels, and wipe well the Mortar.
—Odes to Royal Academicians, Ode iii., p. 8.
Drawing, painting, and classical reading seem, however, to have claimed too much of his time, and his verse-making occupations were no doubt hindrances to his professional progress, for in them he was quite industrious, and from Fowey, in 1756, he sent his poem on the elder “Pitt’s recovery from Gout” to Martin’s Magazine.
His apprenticeship over, he spent a short time in the medical schools of London; then he returned to Devon, where Dr. Huxham, a celebrated Plymouth physician, did him the good service of examining him as to his competency in medicine and surgery, and recommended him to a northern university—that of Aberdeen—for a degree by diploma, which he was fortunate enough to get conferred upon him, receiving his M.D. in September, 1767.
In the same year came an opportunity for foreign travel, of which he eagerly availed himself. Sir William Trelawney, a connection of the family on his mother’s side, and a patient of his uncle’s in Cornwall, was that same year appointed Governor of the island of Jamaica, and taking young Wolcot with him, in a short time made the new-fledged doctor Physician General to the Forces in the island.
Whilst there, in 1769, the idea seems to have occurred to his patron rather than to himself that if he could give his young friend nothing more in the way of official promotion, there was yet the hopeful field of Church preferment, which, in the West Indies, he was able to command. The rich living of St. Ann’s, Jamaica, then enjoyed by an invalid clergyman, was likely to be soon vacant by his demise. Sir William was the patron, and without sufficient thought, as it seems to us, of Wolcot’s unfitness for such a solemn responsibility, urged him to go at once to England and qualify by ordination for the post.
This curious candidate for holy orders was actually ordained deacon on June 24th, 1769, and the following day priest, but he did not on his return secure the living of St. Ann’s, as the incumbent recovered his health and lived on for years. He was, however, solaced by the inferior living of Vere, a parish for which Wolcot procured the services of a curate, himself continuing to reside in the Government House at Spanish Town. The history of this transaction and the profanity of the language in which it is recorded are alike scandalous.
“Go,” said Sir William, “and get japanned. You may safely say that you have an inward call, for a hungry stomach can speak as loudly as a hungry soul!” O tempora, O mores! How very few persons ever imagine Peter Pindar in clerical guise. Sir William Trelawney died, Wolcot returned to England in company with his widow, who died on the voyage. Once more in England, he showed his good sense by reverting, despite the axiom “once a clerk always a clerk,” for his future occupation to medicine, letters, or the fine arts, leaving the sacred office to others.
As a medical man Peter Pindar was a modified failure at the best. He was cordially disliked by his brother practitioners in the Truro district, who in the end drove him out of it. His treatment of fever patients with copious libations of cold water roused their wrath, and they utterly despised the theory expressed in his own words that “a physician can do little more than watch Dame Nature and give her a shove on the back when he sees her inclined to do right.”