WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
(The Stratford Portrait.)
Madame Sévigné wrote of her as “the best doctor in the upper classes; she has rare and valuable compounds of which she gives us three pinches with prodigious effect.” When writing to her daughter, she begs her not to neglect taking such medicines as “cherry water,” “extract of periwinkles,” “viper-broth,” “uric acid,” and “powdered crab’s-eyes.” She says the extract of periwinkles “endowed Madame de Grignam with a second youth.” Writing to her daughter, “If you use it, when you re-appear so fair people will cry, ‘O’er what blessed flower can she have walked,’ then I will answer ‘On the periwinkle.’” She tells, too, how the Capuchins, who still retained their ancient medical reputation, treated the rheumatism in her leg “with plants bruised and applied twice a day; taken off while wet twice a day, and buried in the earth, so that as they rotted away her pains might in like way decrease.” “It’s a pity you ran and told the surgeons this,” she says to her daughter, “for they roar with laughter at it, but I do not care a fig for them.” In like way Madame de Scudery tells Bassy, “There is an abbé here who is making a great bother by curing by sympathy. For fever of all kinds, so they say, he takes the patient’s spittle and mingles it with an egg, and gives it to a dog; the dog dies and the patient recovers.... They say he has cured a quantity of people.”
Turning from these illustrations of medical practice in France to see how identical it is with that adopted in England when Shakespeare lived, we recall the advice of that eminent gentleman, Andrew Rourde, who recommends people to wash their faces once a week only, using a scarlet cloth to wipe them dry upon, as a sure remedy in certain cases. In other instances we find that certain pills made from the skulls of murderers taken down from gibbets, and ground to powder for that purpose, were popular as medicine, that a draught of water drunk from a murdered man’s skull had wonderful medicinal properties, and that the blood of a dragon was absolutely miraculous in the cures it effected. The touch of a dead man’s hand was another ghastly remedy in common use, and the powder of mummy was a wonderful cure for certain grave complaints. Love-philtres were also regarded from a medicinal point of view, and the strange doings of quack accoucheurs are not less absurdly terrible. That the seventeenth century physician himself was not always proof against these products of ancient ignorance and superstition, is abundantly apparent. Van Helmont, the son of a nobleman, born in Brussels, and very carefully educated for his profession, practised both medicine and magic medicinally. He rejected Galen, inclined to that illiterate pretender Paracelsus, and determined that the only way by which he could defy disease, and utterly destroy it, was through what he called Archæus. Speaking of digestion, for instance, he denied that it was either chemical or mechanical in its nature, but the result of this Archæus, a spiritual activity, working in a very mysteriously complicated way, for both evil and good. It has been said that he was one of Lord Bacon’s disciples, but for that assertion there certainly is no sufficient foundation, for Bacon, if a mystic by inclination, was logical in reasoning. In England Van Helmont had an English follower in the person of another physician, Dr. Fludd, a disciple of the famous inventor of the camera obscura, and conjecturally the first photographer. His grand quack remedy was “the powder of sympathy,” which was the “sword-salve” of Paracelsus (composed of moss taken from the skull of a gibbetted murderer, of warm human blood, human suet, linseed oil, turpentine, etc.). This was applied, not to the wound, but to the sword that inflicted it, kept “in a cool place!” Certain plants pulled up with the left hand were regarded as a sure remedy in fever cases, but the gatherer, while gathering, was not to look behind, for that deprived the plants of their medicinal value.
Amongst other physicians of Shakespeare’s century was Mr. Valentine Greatrake, who came to London from Ireland, where his supposed magical cures had been awakening a great sensation. He hired a large house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to which vast crowds of patients of all kinds and conditions crowded daily, all clamouring to be cured. He received them in their order, says an eye-witness, with “a grave and simple countenence.” For, as Shakespeare wrote, “Thus credulous fools are caught.” (“Comedy of Errors,” 1, 2.) Greatrake (afterwards executed for high treason) asserted that every diseased person was possessed by a devil, and that by his prayers and laying on of hands the devil could be cast out. Lord Conway sent for him to cure an incurable disease from which his wife was suffering, and even some of the most learned and eminent people of the time were amongst his patrons. St. Evremond wrote, “You can hardly imagine what a reputation he gained in a short time. Catholics and Protestants visited him from every part, all believing that power from heaven was in his hands.”
In an Act of Parliament which was passed in the year 1511, we read, in its preamble, that “the science and cunning of Physic and Surgery” was exercised by “a great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part have no manner of insight in the same, nor in any other kind of learning—some also can read no letters in the book—so far forth that common artificers, as smiths, weavers, and women, boldly and accostumably took upon them great cures, and things of great difficulty, in which they partly used sorceries and witchcraft, and partly supplied such medicines unto the diseased as are very noisome, and nothing meet therefore; to the high displeasure of God,” etc.
A large number of the pretended remedies thus used in medical practice are clearly traceable back to the ancient Magi, who were professors of medicine, as well as priests and astrologers.
With these facts before you, turn to your Shakespeare, and see how he regarded the popular delusions thus created and fostered, with their
“Distinguished cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such libertines of sin.”
—Comedy of Errors.
Do you remember the other lines from this source, in which the poet speaks of “This pernicious slave,” who “forsooth took on him as a conjurer, and, gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse, and with no face, as’t were, outfacing me, cried out I was possessed.” This is not the stern, grave doctor in “Macbeth,” who did not pretend to “raze out the written troubles of the brain,” but said, “Therein the patient must minister unto himself.” There is no depreciation of the healing art in Shakespeare’s painting of Lear’s physician, as there is of the “caitiff wretch” of an apothecary, who sold poison to Romeo in a very different way to that in which the physician in Cymbeline supplied a deadly drug to the Queen. “I beseech your grace,” says he, speaking in solemn earnestness, “without offence (my conscience bids me ask) wherefore you have commanded of me these most poisonous compounds.” In “All’s well that Ends Well,” you will recognize the foregoing descriptions of medicinal delusions in the interview between Helena and the King, who says, we “may not be so credulous of cure, when our most learned doctors leave us, and the congregated college have concluded that labouring art can never ransom Nature from her maid estate, I say we must not so stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope, to prostitute our past-cure malady to empirics.” In this play both “Galen and Paracelsus” are mentioned, and their names then represented rival schools of medicine.