This physicking off disease is about as foolish as taking physic to prevent it—of which I have said so much in Chapter XI. and elsewhere. I do not, indeed, mean to affirm that it is quite as fatal; though I know not but it may have been fatal in some instances. Death from measles is no very uncommon occurrence in these days. Now how do we know whether it is the disease that kills or the medicine?
And when we physic off, in the way above mentioned, how know we, that if, very fortunately, we do not kill, some other disease may not be excited or enkindled? You are aware, both from what has been said in these pages, and from your own observation, that measles are not unfrequently followed by dropsy, weak eyes, and other troubles. No individual, perhaps, is, by constitution, less inclined to dropsy than myself; yet he who has read carefully what I have noted in Chapter IV., will not be confident of his own safety in such circumstances. Yet if they are endangered who are least predisposed to this or any other disease, where is the safety of those who inherit such a predisposition?
CHAPTER LXVII.
TIC DOULOUREUX.
Some fifty years ago, I saw in a Connecticut paper, a brief notice of the death of an individual in Wellingworth, in that State, from a disease which, as the paper proceeded to state,—and justly too,—not one in a million had then ever felt, and which not many at that time had ever heard of; viz., tic douloureux.
This notice, though it may have excited much curiosity,—it certainly arrested my own attention,—did not give us much light as to the nature of the disease. "What is tic douloureux?" I asked my friends; for at that time, of course, I knew nothing of the study of medicine. They could not tell me. "Why do medical men," I asked, "give us such strange names? Is it to keep up the idea of mystery, as connected with the profession, in order thus to maintain an influence which modest worth cannot secure?"
It was largely believed at that time, by myself and many others, that science, like wealth,—especially medical science,—was aristocratical; that the learned world, though they saw the republican tendencies of things, were predisposed to throw dust in the people's eyes as long as they could. The fact that almost all our medicines, whether in the condition in which we see them labelled at the apothecary's shop, or as prescribed by the family physician, have Latin names,—was often quoted in proof of this aristocratic feeling and tendency.
Now there was doubtless some foundation for this opinion. Medical men did then and still very generally do believe, that it is better, on the whole, for the mass of mankind to have nothing to do with these matters, except at the prescription of those who have given the best part of their lives to the study of medicine and disease. That they are weapons of so much power, that even physicians—men who only partially understand the human constitution and their influence on it—are almost as likely to do harm with them as good, and that it is quite enough for society to bear the evils which are connected with the regular study and practice of the profession, without enduring a much larger host, inflicted by those who have other professions and employments, and must consequently be still more ignorant than their physicians. And may not this be one reason why a foreign language has been so long retained in connection with the names of diseases and medicines?