MEAD.
CHAPTER II.
From the possession of a physician who was kind, generous, and social in the highest degree, but who was certainly more remarkable for strong good sense and natural sagacity than for literary attainments, I passed into the hands of an accomplished scholar. Dr. Mead was allowed even by his antagonists, themselves men of great erudition, to be artis medicæ decus, vitæ revera nobilis, and one who excelled all our chief nobility in the encouragement he afforded to the fine arts, polite learning, and the knowledge of antiquity. But though I had changed masters, it was no small satisfaction to me to return to the old House, for Mead not only succeeded Radcliffe in the greater part of his business, but removed to the residence which he had formerly occupied in Bloomsbury-square[12]. My present master, on commencing his profession, had first settled at Stepney, had then resided in Crutched, and afterwards in Austin Friers, for the purpose of being near St. Thomas’ Hospital; but now the distance of his new abode obliged him to resign the situation of physician to that charitable establishment.
About six months after the death of Radcliffe, I was present at a consultation between Sir Hans Sloane, Dr. Cheyne, and Mead. It was held on the case of Bishop Burnet, the prelate so celebrated for the “History of his own Time,” and for the active part he had taken in the great transactions of that eventful period.
He had been taken ill of a violent cold, which soon turned to a pleurisy; and this increasing, and baffling all remedies, his worthy friend and relation Dr. Cheyne called in the assistance of the two other doctors. Up to this time Burnet had enjoyed uninterrupted good health, which he attributed, not without reason, to his temperate habits. “I will give you,” said the venerable patient to Dr. Mead (for the Bishop was now 72 years old), “a short outline of my course of life. In summer I have been in the habit of rising at five in the morning, in the winter at six; and I have always officiated myself at prayer, though my chaplains may have been present. I then took my tea in company with my children, and read the Scriptures with them. I have generally spent six or eight hours a day in my study. The rest of the day has been passed by me in taking exercise, making friendly visits or cheerful meals. But now, to use an expression of my late gracious master King William, whom I knew well for sixteen years, I feel ‘que je tire vers ma fin.’”
The Doctors listened to the melancholy presage of the Bishop, and having put the necessary questions to him, withdrew into the adjoining apartment, for the purpose of consultation. I was now in company with two physicians of great eminence, though of very different characters. On the one side of me stood Sir Hans Sloane, who had shortly before been created a baronet by His Majesty George the First, being the first physician upon whom an hereditary title of honour had ever been conferred; in his person tall and well made, sprightly in conversation, easy, polite and engaging in his manners, by birth an Irishman. On the other was Dr. Cheyne, a Scotchman, with an immense broad back, taking snuff incessantly out of a ponderous gold box, and thus ever and anon displaying to view his fat knuckles: a perfect Falstaff, for he was not only a good portly man and a corpulent[13], but was almost as witty as the knight himself, and his humour being heightened by his northern brogue, he was exceeding mirthful. Indeed he was the most excellent banterer of his time, a faculty he was often called upon to exercise, to repel the lampoons which were made by others upon his extraordinary personal appearance. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast of the two celebrated men before me.
Sir Hans began by observing, that the age of the Bishop might throw a doubt over the propriety of more bleeding, but he had so often seen the advantage of repeated venesection, that he had the greatest faith in that mode of treatment. “In one case particularly which I saw abroad”—but here let me interrupt the Baronet for a moment, to make an observation, which in the many consultations at which I have been present, has more than once occurred to me. These deliberations are generally proposed either because the attending physician is at a loss what further to suggest, or that he wishes naturally enough to divide the responsibility of the management of a dangerous disease. They are held for the most part upon ailments of a chronic nature, that is upon such disorders as afford time and opportunity to form the judgment, and decide upon a method of practice; for it is lucky that in urgent diseases, or those which are called acute, the remedies are simple, and that where delay would be dangerous, the means of relief are obvious. In consultations, there is of course much scope for diversity of opinion, but in the whole range of the plausible reasoning which the conjectural science of medicine admits of, there is nothing so imposing as a case; it bears down all before it. One of the consulting Doctors, after hearing the history of the previous treatment, advances that he has seen a case similar to the one, now under consideration, in which he did so and so with manifest advantage; the argument is irresistible——
But this by way of parenthesis. “In one case particularly (said Sir Hans Sloane) which I saw abroad, I saved a man’s life, who complained extremely of a great pain in his shoulder, or rather inside of his pleura answering to that part, which increased on breathing high, sighing or coughing, for the patient was troubled with a short cough. The man was on board a ship bound for England, and it was taken by all for sea sickness, but I told them, they were all deceived, and forthwith ordered him to be bled in the arm to about ten ounces, and gave him an emulsion, and a pectoral decoction of barley, liquorish and raisins. I immediately found him much better, and ordered him to continue this, and to take of crab’s eyes and sal prunellæ, of each half a drachm, and to swallow morning and evening the half on’t, drinking afterwards a pectoral draught, and in case of relapse I ordered him to be bled again; which was necessary to be done, for the ship chirurgeon, contrary to my desire, gave him a vomit: the patient, poor fellow! knowing nothing of it, till it was down. His pains thus returned, and I bled him twice on two several days, and with an emulsion he was cured. I have found also (added Sir Hans), in similar cases great advantage in applying a hot bag of parched salt to the side; but bleeding is the main remedy. I have bled a patient five times in her foot and arm in twelve hours.” Whilst the baronet was speaking, the countenance of Dr. Cheyne underwent various changes, and when mention was made of the emulsion, which if I am not mistaken, was a compound of linseed oil, sugar-candy, and decoction of barley, it assumed a very decided expression of disgust, for he was a bon vivant of the first order. To the further employment of venesection, he was rather averse, and insisted much upon the advanced age of the Bishop. “An old man’s body (observed Dr. Cheyne), is like a plant dried by the sun, its fibres are stiff, and juices decayed, and not as in youth able to prepare new nutriment, to repair the loss of solids and fluids. For this decay of the humours, the cure of the cacochymia is necessary; and to renovate the solids, we find no help like warm bathing and unctions, and you yourself (said he archly to Sir Hans) must have remarked, in your own native country, that the Irish live long, who anoint themselves with salt butter.” What the remedies were which were ultimately ordered for the aged Prelate, I do not now recollect, but his own prediction was soon after fulfilled, and he died on the 17th of March 1715.
Of Sir Hans Sloane, I shall have occasion to speak again more than once, and I can do it with confidence, for I had many opportunities of studying his peculiarities, and being in his company, particularly at the conversaziones which were held at his house in Great Russell-street, by Bloomsbury. It was observed of him, that he was on these occasions rather a precise gentleman, and used to go out of temper, when his guests spilled the coffee over his carpets. But he was very lively in discourse, nor did he lack topics, and having been much abroad, loved to talk of his travels. When only in his twenty-eighth year, he had accompanied the Duke of Albemarle[14], on his appointment to the government of the Island of Jamaica, in the quality of physician to his Excellency, being chiefly induced by his attachment to natural history, to undertake a voyage, which was not thought at that time of day to be altogether free from danger. As he was the first man of learning whom the love of science alone had led from England to that distant part of the globe, and was besides of an age when both activity of body, and ardour of mind concur to vanquish difficulties, his travels were eminently successful. To say nothing of the other curiosities with which he enriched his native country, he brought home from Jamaica, and the other islands at which he touched, no fewer than 800 different species of plants, a number much greater than had ever been imported into England before by any individual. His stay in Jamaica did not exceed fifteen months, for the Governor died, and the Doctor returned home, and settled in London. About seven years before the scene at the Bishop’s, he had published the first volume of his Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the natural history of the herbs, and trees, four-footed beasts, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, &c., illustrated with the figures of the things described, which had not heretofore been engraved. In large copper-plates, as big as the life.
This was his first contribution to the general stock of knowledge, and when questioned on the subject of his voyage, he was used to say, that independently of the gratification of a laudable curiosity, he deemed it a sort of duty in a medical man to visit distant countries, for that the ancient and best physicians were wont to travel to the places whence their drugs were brought, to inform themselves concerning them. Speaking of the part of the globe which he had visited, he never ceased to deplore the irreparable loss of fame which this country had suffered, in not being the first to partake in the glory of its discovery. When Bartholomew Columbus, said Sir Hans, was sent to England by his brother Christopher, in 1488, to persuade Henry the Seventh to fit him out for this expedition, a sea chart of the parts of the world then known was produced, and a proposal made to the King, but after much delay and many untoward circumstances, both the map and the proposal were disregarded, and the money that had at first been set apart for the purpose, and thought sufficient for the discovery of the New World, was ultimately expended in the purchase of a suit of fine tapestry hangings, brought from Antwerp, and afterwards used for the decoration of Hampton Court.