How smartly and merrily Shakespeare wrote of such cures as Greatrake professed to effect, we see in Henry VI., where Simpcox, supposed to be miraculously cured of blindness, is asked to and does describe what he sees, “If thou hadst been born blind, thou might’st as well have known all our names as thus to name the several colours we do wear.”
In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” we have “Master Caius that calls himself doctor of physic,” and is called by Dame Quickly a “fool and physician.” The two were in Shakespeare’s time very commonly combined, and often, as we have shown, very strangely. Dr. Caius was a real name borne by a learned gentleman who was physician to Queen Elizabeth. In Cymbeline the name of the physician is Cornelius. This again was the name of a real physician, who, in the sixteenth century, gained great reputation in Europe chiefly by restoring Charles V. to health after a tediously long illness. We may presume that Shakespeare was familiar with the fact.
Amongst the doctors of our poet’s time it was a common custom to throw up cases when they believed them hopeless. Shakespeare’s Sempronius says, “His friends, like physicians, thrice gave him o’er,” and Lord Bacon in his work on “The Advancement of Learning,” says of Physicians, “In the enquiry of diseases, they do abandon the cures of many, some as in their nature incurable, and others as past the period of cure, so that Sylla triumvirs never prescribed so many men to die as they do by their ignorant edicts.” We have spoken of the sword-salve cure for wounds. Of dealers in poison who visited fairs and market-places, and attracted crowds by the aid of a stage fool, we get a glimpse in “Hamlet,” where Laertes says:—
“I bought an unction of a mountebank,
So mortal, that but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood, no cataplasm so rare
Collected from all simples that have virtue,
Under the moon can save the thing from death.”
There is a hit at doctors who gave others remedies they had not enough faith in to adopt for themselves:—
“Thou speak’st like a physician, Helicarnus:
Who minister’st a potion unto me
That thou would’st tremble to receive thyself.”
—Pericles.
In the same play the true physician receives full appreciation. Cerimon says of himself:—
“’Tis known, I ever
Have studied physic, through which secret art,
By turning o’er authorities, I have
Together with my practice, made familiar
To me, and to my aid, the blest infusions
That dwell in vegitives, in metals, stones.
And I can speake of the disturbances
That nature works, and of her cures; which doth give me
A more content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honour,
Or tie my treasure up in silken bags,
To please the fool, and death.”
And one of the two listening gentlemen adds:—
“Your honour has through Ephesus pour’d forth
Your charity, and hundreds call themselves
Your creatures, who by you have been restored.”