Baudin, in his Travels in New Holland, relates that the individuals who have the greatest influence amongst the savages are the mulgaradocks, or medical charlatans. A mulgaradock is regarded as possessing power over the elements either to avert wind and rain, or to call down tempests on the heads of those who come under their displeasure. In order to calm a storm, he stands in the open air, spreads out his arms, shakes his mantle, made of skins, and gesticulates violently for a considerable time. In order to effect a cure, he proceeds much in the same way, but with rather less noise: he practises a mode of rubbing, and sometimes hits the patient with green rods which have first been heated at a fire, stopping at intervals to let the pain pass away. The Africans follow the same fashion; and with the Russians, flagellation and friction by means of a bundle of birch twigs are resorted to. After the subject has been well parboiled in a vapour bath, a pailful of cold water is then dashed over him, the effect of which is described as electrifying. After this, he plunges into the snow, and thus prepares himself to endure the rigour of the climate with impunity. The Siberians and Laplanders also are said to indulge in these luxuries.
To France belongs the credit of giving to modern medicine a scientific system of massage; and yet, in spite of many able works, and various discussions at the Academy of Sciences and other learned societies, it remained a sort of secret practice, almost wholly under the domain of empiricism; but with the waning interest of French physicians, the Germans and Scandinavians took up the subject; and about ten years ago, Dr Mezger of Amsterdam brought massage to be acknowledged as a highly valuable method. He placed it upon the basis of practical knowledge, thus taking it out of the hands of ignorant charlatans. He did not write much about it, but simply employed the teaching of facts. To physicians who wrote to him for an explanation of his treatment, he only said, ‘Come and see.’ To Professor von Mosengeil is owing the present accurate and scientific knowledge of the subject; by his careful and painstaking observations he has brought massage into high esteem, so that it is now acknowledged as a special branch of the art of medicine.
There is, however, a pitfall to be avoided. Dr William Murrell, in his recent practical work, Massage as a Mode of Treatment, gives a very necessary warning to those who would use it ignorantly. He admits that it is not free from the taint of quackery, and that the so-called massage practised in some of our hospitals and under the auspices of some nursing institutions is a painful exhibition of ignorance and incompetence, being simply a degenerate form of rubbing or shampooing. Having lately witnessed the progress of a number of cases under the care of Professor Mosengeil in Germany, he remarks that the massage of ‘medical rubbers’ is not massage at all, as the term is understood on the continent, and has little or nothing in common with it. It is quite a mistake to think we can take John from the stables and Biddy from the washtub, and in one easy lesson convert either into a safe, reliable, or efficient manipulator. Dr Murrell has found it successful in various kinds of paralysis; in writers’, painters’, and dancers’ cramp; and in the cramp of telegraph office operators, who, just as they have attained to the highest point of dexterity, find that every movement is performed with effort and pain, until at last no movement is possible at all.
The chief advocates of massage have been men of note; and although it is only recently that it has gained an extensive scientific consideration, it is gradually but surely obtaining a wider circulation and a higher place as a worthy therapeutical agent.
BY ORDER OF THE LEAGUE.
CHAPTER II.
Without the city walls, hidden by the umbrella pines, and back from those secluded walks where young Rome takes its pleasure, stood the Villa Salvarino, almost under the shade of the walls, and hard by the gate of San Pancrazio. In the more prosperous days of the Eternal City, it might have been, and indeed was, the residence of some great Roman family; but aristocracies decline and families pass away; and the haughty owners were by no means averse from making a few English pounds by letting it to any traveller who had the inclination or the means to spend a few months there. The present tenant at this bright Easter-time, Sir Geoffrey Charteris, of Grosvenor Square, London, W., and Haversham Park, in the county of Dorset, Baronet, Deputy-lieutenant, and Justice of the Peace, was a man of long descent. The pale azure fluid in his veins was not the blood of us poor mortals; his life-giving stream had been transmitted through succeeding generations from a long line of gallant warriors and gentle dames; from fearless ancestors who followed their sovereign at the call to arms, marched with Richard of the Lion-heart to the Holy Sepulchre, and maybe crossed swords with the doughty Saladin himself. The title, conferred upon a Charteris by the Black Prince in person after the glorious field of Creçy, had known no tarnish as it passed down the long line of great and good men, soldiers, statesmen, and divines, to the present worthy representative of all these honours. Not that he had greatly distinguished himself in any field, save as an Under-secretary in a short-lived inglorious Ministry, where he had made a lasting name as the most incompetent individual ever appointed to office, though he dated every subsequent event and prefixed every after-dinner story by an allusion to the time when he was in the Earl of Muddleton’s Ministry.
The reception rooms of the villa were crowded when our friends arrived. It was a kind of informal after-dinner reception, attended by most of the English visitors lingering after the Carnival, with some sprinkling of the resident aristocracy; for Sir Geoffrey liked to gather people round him, birth and genius being equally welcome. Sir Geoffrey looked every inch an English gentleman, standing there among his guests. He was apparently about fifty years of age, tall and straight, thoroughbred from his stiff gray hair to the small shapely feet, as yet untroubled by the family gout. His eyes were pale blue, and somewhat weak; his face, clear-cut and refined, with an aquiline nose and a high white forehead, but the whole marred by a mouth weak and nervous to the last degree. A connoisseur of art, a dabbler in literature, and last, but not least, a firm believer in spiritualism.
Enid Charteris, his only daughter and heiress, a girl about eighteen, must be taken for granted. Imagine in all your dreams of fair women what a golden-bronzed-haired girl should be, and you have Enid, with all her charms of manner and person, with that perfect expression without which the most classic features are cold. She smiled brightly as the new-comers entered. It is not given to every one to be able to disguise their likings and antipathies, and it did not need a practised eye to see her cold greeting for Le Gautier, and the instantaneous glance for Maxwell.
‘I really began to think you were going to fail me,’ she said; ‘and this is the last of our receptions too. I shall always have pleasant recollections of my visit to Rome.’