Post Mortems: II

MERE MORTALS

Boswell: But of what use will my book be when it is finished?

Johnson: Never mind the use—do it!

History is an Art and should be written with imagination.

Anatole France.

Post Mortems: Two

Mere Mortals

Medico-Historical Essays

By
C. MacLaurin
M.B.C.M., F.R.C.S.E., Hon. Deg. Padua
Lately Lecturer in Clinical Surgery, the
University of Sydney; Late Consulting
Surgeon, Royal Prince Alfred
Hospital, Sydney; Late Honorary
Surgeon, Royal
Hospital for Women,
Sydney

New York
George H. Doran Company

COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

MERE MORTALS
—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This book is
Affectionately Dedicated
To my Wife
and
To my Daughter
MRS. A. P. MACKERRAS

Preface

Great numbers of people, especially medical men, have written to me asking me to continue the short studies of great men of the past that I began in Post Mortem; and the result is the present volume.

Many reviewers complained that Post Mortem contained too much “medical jargon,” whatever that may mean. There is doubtfully such a thing as medical jargon; it is merely a method of expressing thoughts for which there is no English equivalent except by the method of a cumbrous sentence. For that reason I have tried to translate my thoughts into English whenever it is possible. If by mischance a technical term should have crept in, you will find most medical terms in any decent modern English dictionary; or failing that, they are all simply taken from the Greek. But there is another jargon than medical. There is the filthy jargon which insists on saying “the Red Plague” when we mean syphilis; or “in a certain interesting condition” when we mean to say “pregnant.”

That jargon I absolutely refuse to use. Those elderly people with fixed minds who prefer that sort of thing had better stick to Little Arthur or something equally fictitious. As a doctor writing on very serious subjects I must claim the doctor’s privilege of writing with absolute frankness; without suspicion of coarseness.

And I beg you not to accept as diagnoses what are sheer speculations.

Acknowledgments

The first drafts of these essays appeared in the Australasian Medical Journal, The Sydney Bulletin, the Australian Home, Art in Australia, and the Australian Forum. They have nearly all been considerably modified with the growth of knowledge and frequent rewriting. I have to thank Miss Kibble, of the New South Wales Public Library, for assisting me immensely in hunting up many authorities from whom I quote. Without her help this book could never have been written.

Glossary

Imperative idea: An idea that, however malapropos it may be, keeps mounting into consciousness.

Obsession: An imperative idea that compels appropriate action.

Phobias: Unconscious fears, often acquired in early infancy, which may ruin a man’s whole life for him. There are many different kinds of “phobia” of which syphilophobia is probably the most common.

These three are all signs of:

Psychasthenia: A weird half-sister of neurasthenia, generally the result of heredity, combined with abnormal education in early youth. In the psychasthenic state the patient may be subject to all manner of imperative ideas, obsessions and phobias. Sometimes he stammers, sometimes he is compelled by his “unconscious” to jerk his limbs about in quaint antics; sometimes he is afflicted with awful doubts and scruples.[1]

All the other medical terms are, I think, explained in the text as they arise.

Contents

Mere Mortals

Dr. Johnson

There can be little doubt that the illustrious Dr. Johnson was a psychasthenic. His father could see in life nothing but gloom, though his mother seems to have been hearty and sensible enough. Therefore presumably we are entitled to say that the Great Cham’s family history was faulty. At an early age he developed some trouble that his parents diagnosed as scrofula, or tuberculous glands of the neck, but Boswell expressly hints was suspected to have been caught from a nurse. They took him to England’s kindly but not intelligent majesty, Queen Anne, who, wearing a long black hood and diamonds to impress her patients, touched him for his “grievous malady.” But she did not cure him; rather it would seem that she made him worse; for all Johnson’s frightful jerkings and grimaces, roarings and puffings, may possibly be traced back to that one moment of nervous tension when he felt himself a little boy, the observed of all observers, waiting to be touched by the sister-in-law of William the Dutchman.

A child of bad heredity—indeed any child—must be treated with the utmost care long before it appears to be conscious, before it appears to take notice of what is going on around it; quarrelsome parents and angry nurses may so warp his whole mental outlook that it is spoiled for life. And it could not have been a good thing for the coming Great Cham to subject him to such nervous strain as was necessarily involved in taking him before Queen Anne. He was lucky in that it did not make him stammer. Many a sensitive boy has been made to stammer by less than was involved in Sam’s childish treatment. Long before a child appears to be conscious its mind is taking notice of all that goes on around it, and its whole future life may be warped in one moment of terror or anxiety. And the sad thing is that probably Mrs. Johnson senior had made a mistake in diagnosis, that probably little Sam was not suffering from scrofula at all, but from some swelling of the glands of the neck that was due to something in his scalp. That he lived till he was seventy-five seems to show that he never suffered either from tuberculosis or syphilis, those two great slayers; and if his glands had really been tuberculous it is probable that, bursting, they would have formed a “mixed infection” that would have had more serious effects than mere local scarring.

It is possible that while the incident persisted in Johnson’s conscious memory as a “confused and solemn memory,” in his unconscious memory it may have persisted in those extraordinary antics which to Boswell seemed a sort of St. Vitus’s dance. Perhaps in them we see the struggles of a sensitive little boy to avoid the frightful ordeal of being “touched” and resentment at the insult to his masculine grandeur. We know that his masculinity had already been very much insulted at the age of three when a schoolmistress ran after him lest he fall into the gutter.

Psychasthenia is a grim half-sister to neurasthenia, from which it appears to differ in that, while neurasthenia merely shows that the man’s nervous system is not sufficiently strong to stand the stout clouts and buffets of this wicked world, in psychasthenia he has never had a chance. The best translation of the term “psychasthenic” appears to be “unbalanced,” and, though probably psychasthenia was about the best term that Professor Janet could have selected for this queer condition, still it conveys an unwarranted implication of imbecility, for many men of the greatest genius have been utterly unbalanced. The man of genius is seldom actually insane, but he is often unbalanced and of the manic-depressive temperament; at any moment he may be “knocked off his perch” and may become definitely insane.

Thus, subject always to the possible denial of the alienists, I should certainly imagine that Beethoven was psychasthenic, for he was always falling in and out of love, was constantly quarrelling with his landlords, cast his rice pudding at the cook, jammed his hat fiercely on his head when he and Goethe walked before royalty, was looked upon as crazy, and used to run about the fields trying to roar the latest melody that had come into his head. And Charles Lamb not only stammered but had a sister who was definitely insane.

The unbalanced are subject to queer actions which appear to take their origin in the unconscious mind. Thus, there arise from the unconscious into consciousness imperative ideas which insist on recognition however malapropos they may happen to be. Sometimes these actually go on to form obsessions, and I must ask you to permit me to define these two important terms. The imperative idea simply arises into consciousness out of the unconscious. When it compels appropriate action it is generally, though not always, called an obsession. Thus, when Johnson walked along Fleet Street the imperative idea arose from his unconscious that it would be a fitting thing to put his hand upon every horse-post that he passed. When he did so or turned on his tracks that no horse-post should be left uncapped the definition of an obsession would appear to be correct. And from the unconscious arise those queer phobias or fears which often so strangely influence their actions.

Still gossiping about the unbalanced, was St. Francis of Assisi entirely sane when he left all the money that he owed his father on a heap of his clothes and set out to build a church with his own hands? If this be insanity let us have more of it. The ordinary sane stodgy man does not lead the world; secure in his stodginess he makes money and lives happy ever after. But the genius is always a little “cracked,” otherwise he would probably not be a genius. And so many of them have been ill men; in fact one can hardly call to mind as one writes a single really healthy and sane genius, unless possibly Sir Walter Scott. St. Francis is said to have had renal tuberculosis.

That is probably the only real serious objection to birth-control; you can never tell whom you are condemning to perpetual absence of life. Thus Abraham Lincoln, strictly speaking, should never have been born, for his mother, Nancy Hanks, though never insane, lived all her life in the depths of gloom and on the verge of insanity. Yet it would appear that the absence of Old Abe at a given crisis of the world’s history might have made some difference to civilisation. And even if we are to take bodily health as the criterion of fitness, what about Mozart, the tuberculous and pallid little genius of Vienna whom many people still consider as the very greatest musician that ever lived? Certainly not even Beethoven in his first period ever attained to Mozart’s delicious childlikeness of touch.

If the world had insisted that St. Francis of Assisi, Abe Lincoln, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart should not have been born one would think that the world would now be a poorer place than it is. And one names only a few; for Spinoza should never have been born, doomed to live only a few years and then to die of tuberculosis while he was mystically trying to reduce God to a mathematical formula.

In fact one could go on for weeks on this subject, and the conclusion that any fair-minded person must reach is that birth-control, even of the apparently unfit, is too risky an experiment for the human race to try if it wishes to keep its geniuses. You never can tell what the infant may turn out that you are preventing from being born. But I am aware that this is a highly contentious subject, and that awful thing, “the sex-war,” is involved in it. People are sure to have differences of opinion about it; since woman has risen to her new estate these opinions will assuredly be held with more vigour than ever.

“Treat ’em rough” is a known and tried aphorism, which has been elevated to a pitch of almost epic grandeur by Schopenhauer’s “Pitch ’em downstairs”; and probably some such aphorism was in Johnson’s mind when he rode with old Mrs. Porter to the church that they might be married, and, you remember, reduced her to tears before they got there. Up till then he probably had only the poet’s knowledge of woman; but that after such an ill beginning the marriage turned out so happily, seems to argue that Mrs. Porter, though she might paint her face, was nevertheless a woman with the heart of a lion to tame his aggressively masculine soul. And it is quite possible that before she died—she was twice his age, you know—he began to have for her a love similar to that one has for a mother. Of course it may be that Boswell, in his uncomplimentary description of Johnson’s wife, was misled by jealousy of her who sat too near the throne of his hero-worship. But in any case she must have been a remarkable woman to tame Ursa Major as she did.

If one were to translate psychasthenic into “poor in spirit”—which is not very far from its Greek meaning—probably we should come very near to its real inner meaning; and we have the best possible authority for knowing the post-mortem future of the poor in spirit. If the Kingdom of Heaven is to be composed of such men as Johnson and Beethoven it would not be a bad place to inhabit, though the shade of Johnson would certainly insist on carrying home some fallen angel, while Beethoven would probably throw something at a monotonous orchestra of harps, if he could hear it.

In support of the contention that towards the end of her life he had begun to consider Mrs. Porter as less a wife in the ordinary sense of the term than a mother-surrogate whom he could trust as a faithful friend who would never desert him whatever the circumstances, here is a letter that he wrote to the Rev. Dr. Taylor on the day she died:

“Sir,

“Pray desire Mrs. Taylor to inform me what mourning I should buy for my mother and Miss Porter, and bring a note of writing with you.”

His dear wife dead he could not trust himself even to buy mourning without her aid.

He appears not to have been able even to take care of himself without some woman to act the mother towards him. Years later he found another mother-surrogate in Mrs. Thrale, who saw to it that he wore respectable clothing with brass buttons, and silver buckles—not too big—on his shoes. It was evidently a severe blow to him when the naughty thing went and married Signor Piozzi, for it left him without a single woman to show him how to take care of himself.

That nervous malady which Boswell diagnosed as a sort of St. Vitus’s dance probably merely represented the violent impulsive and involuntary movements occasionally seen in psychasthenia; had the defect affected the nerves of speech Johnson would probably have stammered; but one can never imagine a man so aggressive stammering.

How far back in life is it possible to remember? Freud thinks that the first five years of life are not retained in conscious memory, although they exercise the greatest possible influence upon our afterlives. Personally I try to think that my first recollection is that of the frightful itching that accompanied the wearing of my first pair of knickerbockers, which my mother used to tell me occurred on my fourth birthday; but it is so difficult to distinguish between what you remember and what older people have told you that one must sometimes think that after all probably Freud may be right, and it is impossible to remember before the fifth birthday.

Johnson’s roars and bluster were probably really to conceal an innate shyness that is frequently seen in very nervous men. In further evidence that he was at heart a shy man here is a letter that he wrote to his old friend Dr. Birch:

“March 29, 1765.

“To Dr. Birch,

“Sir:

“I have sent some parts of my dictionary, such as were at hand, for your inspection. The favour which I ask of you is that if you do not like them, you will say nothing.

“I am, sir,

“Your most affectionate humble servant,

“Sam Johnson.”

He could not even bear to hear the faithful words of his old friend about the child of his brain, though he felt himself entitled to sign “your most affectionate humble servant.”

Like most men of apparently strong common sense, when you look too critically into their dogmata, Johnson’s common sense begins to look more like uncommon foolishness; for it was certainly no answer to Bishop Berkeley’s metaphysics to bang his foot against a stone. It requires a far more subtle argument which must probably be fortified by the eye of faith, which, you remember, has been defined as “the faculty of believing what you know to be untrue.” But Johnson’s argument is the sort of bluff obvious thing that so appeals to a common-sense person like John Bull. And doubtless that is why Johnson has so appealed to John Bull that he has almost been elevated to the pinnacle of a national hero. Full of rats, poor old gentleman; yet one can’t help loving him for his rats.

As woman seldom stammers, so she is seldom afflicted by psychasthenia, which, being a variation, appears to be almost confined to the male, like genius. Woman is seldom “ratty”; she has far too much hard common sense. Who ever heard of women killing each other to settle whether a word should be spelt homooisian or homoousian? Or to decide whether there are three Gods or One? Yet men have waged savage tumult over these very things, which no person can possibly know. Sometimes lady novelists seem to go ratty when they try to describe men, and ultimately describe some creature who is like nothing on earth; but it is only fair to say that such lady novelists are suspected by men to be between the ages of forty and fifty, and probably for a time slightly unbalanced. But the normal average woman is far saner than the normal average man. Once she has secured her man her chief duty afterwards seems to be to see that his rats do not lead him away from the paths of respectability, into such nonsense as that of Bernard Palissy, for instance, who burned even his furniture to keep the stove going that might lead to the discovery of a porcelain glaze, even though his wife and children might starve. No woman ever followed a will-o’-the-wisp with such fury, simply because no woman was ever so ratty; it is hardly respectable; it seems to be purely a matter of sex-physiology.

But we must dilate yet a little further on the utterly unbalanced character of Johnson. An incident is told of him in 1784, when he was about 74 years of age; as it is impossible to tell it better than Boswell, let us leave it in Boswell’s own words. “Coming home late one night he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much exhausted that she could not walk; he took her upon his back” (by the way it was a quite unnecessarily laborious and cumbersome way to carry a woman; for a giant like Sam it would have seemed an easier matter to stoop down and pick her up in his arms), “and carried her to his home, where he found her to be one of those wretched females who have sunk to the lowest levels of vice, poverty, and disease. Instead of upbraiding her he had her taken care of with all care and tenderness for a long time at considerable expense, till she was restored to health and endeavoured to put her into a virtuous way of living.” This was just the sort of kind, impulsive, and senseless thing that would seem so utterly natural to a psychasthenic and so utterly silly to a normal man. We know now that it is almost impossible to reclaim a prostitute, for no normal woman ever becomes a prostitute. Normal woman always has far too much dignity and self-respect and reads too mystic a meaning into the sexual act ever to offer herself to the embraces of any casual man in the street, however great her economic distress; rather if driven into a corner by poverty a normal woman finds some one male friend to help her, so that she may console herself with the thought that at least she is married in the sight of God, if not in the sight of man. Normal woman is essentially monogamous. But Sam appears to have been as hopeful of success as Theodora when she made her famous raid upon the brothels of Byzantium; one would like to know the ultimate success or failure of his adventure into the underworld. We know that poor Theodora failed absolutely. One cannot help wondering what Anna Williams would have thought of it, for women are the enemies of women; but fortunately for her she seems to have been recently dead, having quarrelled with everyone who was open to quarrel with her. If this be true, at least she never knew to what depths of degradation Samuel could sink. But a doctor can easily imagine the fulsome gratitude that would be lavished by the poor starving prostitute upon the huge preserver when she woke up and found him giving her something to eat without wanting anything else from her. Prostitutes do not meet with so much disinterested kindness in this world that it ever palls. That is why it is so sad that sexual reclamation of them is almost impossible, for too often they carry the seeds of their own destruction with them.

Then there is that delicious incident of Mr. Osborn the bookseller. “The fellow insulted me, so I beat him; but it was in the privacy of my own chamber—it was not in his shop.” Of course. To knock down a publisher was only quite right and proper. Who would not do it? But even a publisher has his rights. To do it in his own shop would be to expose him to the insults of his own servants, and that is positively not done, especially by an Oxford man. Rats, pure rats. Yet publishers are said to be fair game for authors and so far no close-season has been proclaimed for them.

Few men attain to the age of seventy odd without some warning that they are mortal and that the grave is waiting. Of course there is the classic instance of Voltaire, who from the age of sixty odd complained of mortal illness, and yet, recovering, lived to a vast age, wizened, malicious, and “peaky” as a rat. But then, like Mr. Blake, Voltaire was a regular out and out hardened sinner and words could not possibly express the contempt that he felt for the mediæval devil of eighteenth-century Christianity. Probably he persisted in living on just to cheat the devil of his just due because he despised him so.

As a matter of fact we often find that soon after fifty some illness attacks a man from which he never really recovers, even though he may appear to be well; there is always the trifling difference in him that marks the passage of the years. Johnson’s warning came to him—though he did not observe it—many years before when Boswell could observe the sight that he made of himself as he gobbled his meals.

He was evidently very fond of eating; himself, he boasted of his delicate tastes in food; and when he ate “the veins of his forehead stood out and a strong perspiration was visible.” This appears to have much disgusted Macaulay, but most of us have seen similar prowess in perfectly worthy men. Presumably when Boswell said “the veins of his forehead” he meant the superficial temporal arteries, for if they had really been the soft and thin-walled veins, Johnson, bestrewn with bladders, would have looked indeed noteworthy. But there came a time when they stood out once too often, and probably they never shrank back again to the normal size, but became thickened. Thus his blood-pressure rose under the strain of arteriosclerosis and in the course of years the inevitable results of gluttony overtook him. Drink, guzzle, and syphilis are the three deadly sins, and they are deadly in proportion to the effect that they cause upon the arteries. And in the term “arteries” one includes heart and kidneys. The heart is simply a large expansion of an artery, and the kidneys are merely a network of arterioles and capillaries; if one part goes all the rest follow, and thus it is that the term “cardiovascular disease” is generally used to describe the results of high blood-pressure. It is of course possible that Johnson’s glooms may have been due to intestinal auto-intoxication; but melancholia is a constant companion of an unduly sensitive nervous system.

Warnings came in 1782 with breathlessness and pain in the chest; the heart was evidently beginning to rebel, but the first real alarming warning came on the night of June 17th, 1783, when he awoke in the middle of the night and found that he could not speak. Trying to write, he found that “my hand made wrong letters,” that is to say he had not only aphasia, but “agraphia” or loss of power to write. Possibly if anybody had happened to think of it he might have been able to communicate with the outer world by means of children’s block letters. But nobody did; and when his servant came in the morning he could not comprehend why the old gentleman expected him to read something that he had written instead of speaking in answer to his own chatter.

This sudden aphasia in old people is not uncommon, and may be due to several causes, that all in one way or other affect the so-called “speech centre” of the brain. As the “writing centre” is situated in the very near vicinity, it is not surprising that a lesion that affects one generally also affects the other. That Johnson’s right hand was not also paralysed at the same time is rather unusual, because the left side of the brain which controls the right side of the body also contains the speech centre; and it is supposed that it does so because man has for many thousands of years been accustomed to use his right hand more than his left, wherefore the left side of his brain would naturally be more ready to acquire new functions than the right, which only controls the comparatively awkward left hand. If this theory be true it would rather seem to show that men were accustomed to use their right hands long before they could speak; and this indeed is quite probable.

The exact lesion would appear to have been that one of the cerebral arteries that supplied the left side of Johnson’s brain had for some reason been thrown into a state of spasm, and caused temporary softening of the brain owing to interference with its blood-supply. If an artery had actually burst on the site of a tiny aneurysm, as occasionally happens in cases of arteriosclerosis, the old man would not have recovered so soon, even temporarily. As it was, he seems to have recovered sufficiently by July to pay a visit to Dr. Langton at Rochester. The shock and terror induced by an attack of aphasia are generally very dreadful. I remember one elderly lady, who had always been of a most gentle and virtuous way of living, who one day suddenly sat up in bed with a scream, clutching at her bedclothes and at her throat and uttering meaningless noises like an ape. Twelve hours later she had for a time recovered her power of speech, and after lying musing for half an hour, said in her customary gentle voice, “I should like some fish; they say fish is good for the brain.” She had somewhere read that fish contains a large amount of phosphorus, which is supposed to be good for the brain—by patent-medicine vendors. But I shall never forget the scream of that poor lady, nor the look of terror that came over her gentle face.

Johnson’s terror led him to write a prayer for his recovery, done in Latin verse. “The lines were not very good, but I knew them to be not very good, so concluded that I was not impaired in my faculties.” There you see at once the supreme passion of the man—Learning—coming out in what he thought to be the very article of death.

Then, “in order to rouse the vocal organs, I took two drams. Wine has been celebrated for the production of eloquence, so I put myself into violent motion and I think repeated it; but all was in vain.” It is hardly fair to comment upon this action of a man bemused with terror and aphasia that probably wine was the very worst thing he could have taken; for it tends to raise the blood-pressure. Not that it made much difference; Death was focussing his eyes on Dr. Johnson; the call was coming, and no earthly power could avert it.

But apparently even Boswell nods; for after telling of Johnson’s terrible illness in 1783 he goes on to tell how in 1784 he was able to put a woman on his back and carry her home. Well, one simply does not believe it; the thing is impossible; Boswell must have got his dates mixed a little; for to carry a woman, even though she were starving and the man a giant, is no small feat; and if the man were very old and had just recovered from an attack of aphasia, it would be absolutely incredible. Really, wonderful though we men are—in no way more wonderful than in our power of believing nonsense—we are not such terrible fellows as some say.

After the paralytic stroke all the devils in hell seem to have settled upon the poor old gentleman, with their gout, dropsy, and continual fear of death. Probably the gout was simply another manifestation of the defect of metabolism—faulty chemical physiological process, or dystrophy—that had caused his high blood-pressure. The asthma and oppression in his chest were probably due to a failing heart; and thence also doubtless came the dropsy; for dropsy is not a disease—it is a symptom of many things, generally cardiac or renal. And his cough became exceedingly troublesome, possibly due to congestion of the base of his lungs that would be caused in a way much the same as caused the dropsy; he was becoming “water-logged.”

A rather remarkable thing is that, once having become filled up with dropsy, he got rid of it apparently suddenly. If I remember rightly Dr. Johnson was taking squills at the time, and squills is still used for getting rid of fluid from the body, though it has been supplanted by more efficient drugs. One might perhaps think that hope told Johnson a flattering tale, but he says expressly that he got rid of twenty pints. Queer things happen in dropsy, and even such a pseudo-miracle as Johnson’s is not unknown. Once water-logged with dropsy, legs, belly, lungs and all, it would have seemed to require a miracle to get him emptied, and miracles seldom happen.

The really wonderful thing is, however, that a man of so gloomy a temperament as the Great Cham should have retained such comparative cheerfulness of spirits as he had even after an experience so depressing as an attack of aphasia. He must have been a remarkably brave old man, which is quite in accordance with his strongly masculine character. And this discovery of the wrong dating of one of the most remarkable things that Boswell tells of him only makes his conduct more heroic; for if what I surmise is true, Miss Williams must have been alive and quarrelsome, ready to give Sam the rough side of her tongue for daring to carry home a woman of abandoned character. Cynics have said that to marry a woman is to marry a conscience; but it is even more terrible when the woman is not a man’s wife, but, old, blind, deaf, and quarrelsome, is dependent on his generosity for a living. She may probably consider it her duty to look after his morals as strictly as though she were his wife.

His actual end seems to have been caused by a mild terminal pneumonia, which in a healthy young person would have been thrown off like a cold in the head; but was too much for ancient lungs and tired heart.

“To be miserable,” said Goldsmith, who had known what it was to be inarticulate and despised, “was to ensure the protection of Dr. Johnson.” Was not that a better definition of sainthood than whimsically to pervert the Sermon on the Mount?

To sum up, probably all Johnson’s psychasthenic involuntary movements, which made him so strange a figure to his contemporaries, took their origin in unconscious memory of some affront to his childish masculinity, such as would be caused by taking him to Queen Anne to be “touched.” And she was not even a king, nor yet even in the direct line of accession either! These women! They will go poking their noses in everywhere.

And possibly here too many have been the source of those extraordinary imperative ideas which it was dangerous to deny, lest he roar at you for an ignorant and intolerant fellow. Assuredly you cannot treat a child too carefully if you want it to grow up a sane and normal member of the human race.

King Henry the Saint

It was probably because of his unfair treatment when he was a child that Henry VI of pathetic memory was driven “psychasthenic” in its etymological meaning of “weak-souled.” His father was Henry V, the strong man of Agincourt; his mother Katherine of Valois, herself the daughter of a lunatic. This little boy, of unsound heredity, was born at Windsor while his father was fighting in France, and barely was he five months old when his mother bethought her that her duty was by the side of her husband. She therefore left her baby to the care of a wet-nurse while she herself crossed the Channel. At that time Henry V was sickening for the illness which was soon to kill him. Probably it was the result of hard fighting and worry, together with, as was so often the case with fifteenth-century kings, eating too much.

When he was less than two years old his faithful lieges of the House of Commons asked that they might see him; so mother, nurse and baby set off in “chairs” from Windsor to London. On a certain Saturday they reached Staines, on the banks of the Thames, and on the following day they had purposed to journey to London. But alas! this defilement of the Sabbath so horrified the little king, then doubtless “teething,” that he set up a vast hullabaloo: so bitterly did he weep that the distracted mother and nurse had perforce to take him back to his lodgings, where doubtless the maternal slipper bore its part in his education, for the horrified chronicler tells us that she used every effort. This may have been the first of the famous thrashings that little Henry received, though probably there had been others; in fact, his boyhood seems, to put it crudely, to have been one long wallop. The day of rest having been passed in consoling the infant, and no doubt giving him teething powders or dill-water, and other days having arrived by effluxion of time, they finally got him up to Westminster, where doubtless he twiddled his toes and “gooed” before an admiring concourse of members of Parliament. Soon afterwards the privy council appointed another nurse, probably because the first had so signally failed to smother his bawlings when his subjects had wished to see him. To her he gave an edict that she was to use “every effort to reasonably chastise Us on meet occasion”; so it was clear that chastisement bulked largely in the thoughts of fifteenth-century educationists in dealing with Henry VI.

When he was five he opened Parliament in person, and was set upon a horse to ride throughout London, where the lieges remarked upon the wonderful likeness he bore to the “lovely countenance” of his illustrious father. Quite probably there was a certain amount of imagination in this remark, because everybody knows how a lump of putty on a baby’s face is stoutly asserted by an adoring nurse to be the living image of the noble Roman nose of its father. The imagination of nurses is indeed wonderful.

Then he was, by the terms of his father’s will, put into the hands of the Earl of Warwick as preceptor. Warwick is generally held to have been the model of a preceptor, but one has doubts; for in after years, when Henry had reached the years of articulate complaint, he meekly spoke to the privy council of the thrashings that he had had to endure. Byron has well summed up the orthodox method of instruction:

“O ye who teach the ingenuous youth of nations,

England, France, Holland, Italy or Spain;

I pray you chastise them on all occasions;

It mends their morals—never mind the pain.”

And as the House of Lancaster was nothing if not orthodox I have no doubt that the good Earl did his duty faithfully by his pupil.

Next he had to be crowned King of England; and the ceremony seems to have been distinguished by the inordinate number of times that the archbishop had to strip the little boy to his undershirt and make him don other robes. A collection of clerics had to assist him off the platform staggering under the weight of that crown which was to prove too heavy for him when the murderous political uproar of the Wars of the Roses came to pass.

Then they took him to Paris to crown him King of France, by order of his father, who, dying, still considered himself the great conqueror of France. According to Miss Christie, biographer of Henry VI, the English did everything possible on the occasion to hurt the feelings of the French, but probably little Henry quite enjoyed the service, just like a modern schoolboy. At any rate he got away for a time from his preceptor, who had been busily employed as gaoler to Joan of Arc, treating her with quite unnecessary savagery.

Then came the long process of making peace with France after the Hundred Years’ War. It seems to have consisted of each side making truces which were meant to be broken as soon as made. Then, when he was twenty-three, his subjects ordered their meek king to get him a wife, and after a hunt with varying fortunes among all the princesses of Western Europe who seemed likely to suit, he selected Margaret of Anjou, an exceedingly pretty and lively girl with whose portrait he fell in love. She was then sixteen, and set off for England with high hopes on both sides. Alas! once more the pathetic tragi-comedy of poor Henry VI’s life displayed itself; for the crossing was terribly rough, and Margaret was desperately seasick. Henry rushed to meet her, doubtless to see if she was as pretty as her picture, but she had caught chicken-pox on the ship and he had to postpone the wedding until the pretty bride recovered. Her experience was almost like that of some English brides, who, reaching Melbourne, have found the mosquitoes so attentive that they have come on to Sydney a mere simulacrum of the blooming fresh beauty that had got on board the ship so hopefully at Tilbury Docks.

Six years later, when the Wars of the Roses were coming into full blast and England was rent in twain by quarrels among aristocratic families which were only to be settled by the rise of the heavy-handed Tudors, she bore him his only son; but the effort was disastrous not to her, but to poor young Henry himself. The anxiety, both over her and over his distracted country, had driven him “melancholy,” and he developed well-marked melancholia.[2] While the king lay helpless and silly, unable even to take cognisance of his new-born son when Margaret held it up to him, Margaret took the leadership of England into her own strong hands.

One cannot help wondering how Margaret got on with the nursing. As she was just about to become a mother herself she could not have been very strong; certainly not strong enough to nurse a great big helpless baby as well as her own tiny pink little new-born. Probably she got the duchess of this or the countess of that to do the bulk of the work—for nursing is hard work. There is far more in it than merely fanning a fevered brow and talking romantic nonsense to a helpless man. One often sees two little energetic women go to a bedside, grasp a sick man where it will not hurt him, and then in the twinkling of an eye, he, a mass of incarnate pain, has been moved to an entirely new position with never a twinge. But—they are professional nurses; it has taken them years to learn the little trick. It does not come to woman by a special gift of God. The most fervent wifely devotion does not compensate for its absence. We saw a great deal of these aristocratic amateur nurses during the war; there was a certain royal lady who sometimes used to help me at operations in London, and a great big kind-hearted smiling woman she was, though not very intelligent. But if she made a blunder—and it was never very serious—she always passed it off with so happy a smile that we always overlooked it.

If my reading of Queen Margaret’s character is correct she was a very determined though not very wise young woman, and if her assistant made a bad break doubtless she felt the rough edge of the queen’s tongue. But the main thing was that poor silly young Henry recovered and his wife was able to get on with her war without being worried by anything worse than the normal troubles of a nursing mother.

If she had been a woman before, nursing her saintly husband as if he had been her son, she became a tigress now that she had a real son of her own to fight for; and we have a vivid picture of her raising an army for the House of Lancaster:

“Many assembled for love they bare to the king, but more for the fear they had for the queen, whose countenance was so terrible and whose look was so fearful that to all men against whom she took a small displeasure her frouning was their undoing and her indignation was their death.”

Could this furious mænad have been the same as the pretty girl who landed, eager, seasick, and ready for chicken-pox, just before her wedding?

We need not go through the whole melancholy history of the Wars of the Roses, which were really just the fifteenth-century murderous way of holding a general election, but without even our modern profession of principles. Everybody knows how Edward IV became king in one of the temporary lulls, how Henry VI, after another attack of melancholia, was captured in spite of the efforts of his strenuous wife; and how, at the battle of Bosworth Henry VII killed his rival Richard of Gloucester, and at last began modern history with the iron rule of the Tudors. Many of us have been to St. Albans, and will be interested in the two particularly savage elections that were held in that city; by a strange misnomer they have been called battles. The wounded used to run into the vast old cathedral for shelter while the election raged furiously up and down the pleasant streets of that dear old town. Of all the houses that looked down upon the fighting and resounded to the roar of the newly invented cannon I suppose that the only ones still standing are the cathedral itself and the ancient hostelry at which so many of us have had afternoon tea.

Edward IV imprisoned poor hapless Henry for years; but at last the redoubtable Warwick the Kingmaker restored the rightful—and by that time melancholic and imbecile—monarch to the throne, amid general rejoicings. His second reign lasted only ten months, terminating in the Tower. There can be little doubt that Richard of Gloucester murdered him privily therein. In 1910 his remains were dug up, and his thin light skull was found with its remnants of hair still plastered with blood.

It would appear that King Henry took to religion as a means of escape from the miseries of his youth. Probably he felt that in the Church only could he see the slightest sign of sympathy for little overthrashed boys.

He was the gentlest and most virtuous of men. The most violent oath that even his worst sufferings ever wrung from his lips was “Forsoothe and forsoothe,” sometimes varied by “Fie for shame.” Queen Margaret could have done better. Once he fled from a ball because the clothes of the ladies displayed more than he thought proper. But even the fury of Margaret could not protect him when Richard Hunchback found him in the way.

Henry’s obsessions took the form of impulsive and senseless generosity to his supposed friends, and of singing unduly loudly in church. Though he was meek enough, Richard of Gloucester showed him that he could not inherit the earth, and according to some religions Margaret, being a woman, would never have been allowed to show him the way past the golden gate into the kingdom of heaven.

Poor, gentle, virtuous Henry; so well-meaning, yet so overwhelmed by the sense of his sin!

And poor tigerish Margaret of Anjou! If she had had sense enough to “come in out of the wet” we might now be saying “Good Queen Peggy” instead of “Good Queen Bess.” But how can you expect a woman to show common sense and self-restraint when she knows they are attacking her only son? They killed him at last at Tewkesbury almost before her eyes, and thenceforward Margaret became a very tigress and was always intriguing with Louis XI to avenge herself upon the Yorkists.

King Henry VIII

“Never ask me,” said John Hunter, “what I have said or written, but ask me what my present opinions are and I will tell you.”

“Know syphilis in all its manifestations and relations, and all other things clinical shall be added unto you.”—Osler.

It is extraordinary what a popular aversion there seems to be to the idea that this man had syphilis, and that many of his actions were due to his syphilis. To judge by the number of letters that I have received from both England and America one would be inclined to think that he was suffering from measles. This I interpret in two ways: firstly, that people still cling to the idea that syphilis is a “loathsome disease”; secondly, that they do not wish to have their pet ideal of a monster rationally explained in medical terms. As a matter of fact, syphilis is far more than a loathsome disease of skin and bone; it would be quite as reasonable to call it often a very grim disease of brain, mind, soul and body. Since the general use of mercury its skin and bone manifestations have sunk into comparative harmlessness, and since the general use of the arseno-benzol compounds the disease seems to have become still less dangerous to the body; but there is always before us the fact that it may be a very terrible affliction for mind and nervous tissues. But people love to hug their little delusions, and so long as they cling to the idea that it is only a “loathsome disease,” so long will syphilis continue to destroy the flower of the human race—hard-working intellectual middle-aged men who once upon a time were very human youths.

And there seems to be a misconception about its hereditary nature. The child of a syphilitic may be apparently healthy in appearance, though its resistance to other diseases may be low; it would need a blood examination by Wassermann’s test to make sure that its troubles were really syphilitic. It need not necessarily show the classical symptoms of “snuffles,” wasting, and rash. All that may happen is that its whole body resisting power is damaged, and it falls a prey to one or other of the innumerable disease germs that are always ready to attack us.

Furthermore, so virulent is sectarian prejudice that almost every single point about Henry’s life seems still to be in dispute. If anybody could tell me a safe track through the maze of conflicting accounts of the reign of Henry Tudor, between the modern feminists who still cling to the idea that he was an unspeakable monster, the Roman Catholic Church which still paints him as the very devil, Froude who hailed him as the great Protestant hero of the Reformation, and the accounts of the ordinary man who looks upon him as a bloodthirsty spot of grease—I believe Charles Dickens used that elegant description—I should welcome it; but as I have no criterion of truth but what medical experience has shown me to be true of men, women and disease, I can only follow the account of him given by Professor Pollard, who, treating him with studied moderation, was prepared to consider him as the “great Erastrian,” the protagonist of State against Church. No doubt that is substantially true. It is not for a doctor to say.

Even the number of premature births endured by his wives is in dispute; and all sorts of cock-and-bull stories are made up to show that his children, if born alive, or his wives if they took ill were singularly subject to the effects of cold and overlong christenings. Once would be all very well; but when it happens more than once it becomes suspicious. It is wonderful what people can invent when they wish to explain a thing by religious and political conspiracies—of which they can really know nothing in an age so utterly different from ours, in which the actors have long gone beyond our intimate knowledge—when the obvious medical truth is staring them in the face. Human beliefs have changed, but syphilis is still the same.

I follow Pollard because he impresses me as a man of common sense. I have not met him; but the sheer virulent abuse of the ordinary man is no argument and is a better description of the critic’s own mind than of his subject.

The facts which can only reasonably be explained by the idea that he was suffering from constitutional syphilis are as follows—I put them in the order in which they impress myself:

(a) The extraordinary number of premature births and dead children from two of his wives, one of whom was young and healthy. The early death of Catherine’s first-born son is attributed to the strain of a long christening on a bitter midwinter day.

(b) The poor health of at least three of his children, Mary Tudor, Edward VI, and the illegitimate Duke of Richmond; whether Elizabeth escaped the infection is at least doubtful since Professor Chamberlain has carefully investigated the details of her health.

(c) The terrible degeneration, mental, moral, and physical, which set in in his early middle age.

(d) The facts contained in the extract from the British Medical Journal of 1910: “From being an able and athletic man he had become a mass of loathsome infirmities. He was bloated in face and so unwieldy that he could hardly pass through an ordinary door. His legs were swollen and covered with festering sores, causing an unbearable stench. Towards the end those about him saw that death was at hand, though, according to Foxe, he would never allow it to be mentioned in his hearing. Kings never seem to have liked it to be recognised that they are mortal, in which reluctance to face facts they are much like other people.”

(e) The sinus in his leg which caused him unbearable agony whenever it was closed. This seems to have been syphilitic periostitis occurring in an essentially neurotic man.

(f) Death in stupor at the comparatively early age of fifty-five.

Not any single one of these symptoms is indubitable evidence of syphilis, but taken altogether there is no other reasonable explanation. In syphilis and self-indulgence we have the secret of the whole tragic development of this king’s character. Syphilis alone would doubtfully have accounted for it, even less perhaps gluttonous and bibulous self-indulgence. It is quite true that after his first marriage he seems to have abandoned all moral restraint, or at least guidance by ecclesiastics and the Church; but his dreadful degeneration was not a result of doing so; he did so because he was influenced by the spirochæte and gluttony combined. To-day, when a man gets into gaol for any particularly shameless offence—especially sexual—the very first thing that the police surgeon does is to perform a Wassermann test upon his cerebro-spinal fluid; and I am perfectly certain that if it were possible to do so upon Henry Tudor, the report would come back marked “Wassermann plus,” and probably towards the end of his life “plus plus plus!”

But when did he catch it? He does not seem to have obviously infected any of his wives, so far as we can tell, so the inference is that he must have caught it several years before he married Catherine of Aragon. Well, he married her when he was little more than eighteen, so he must have caught it when he was thirteen or fourteen, at about the very earliest that a gay and showy boy of the Renaissance could manage to catch it. Then probably the primary lesion, so apparently innocent and harmless, healed up under the influence of some simple ointment,[3] just as it does to-day in thousands of men, who bitterly rue later the one little slip that was to cause them all their woes—and Henry went his life through, probably having quite forgotten the trifling incident. To this day we find that those cases of syphilis which are trifling at first, are just the very cases which, under the influence of worry, lack of treatment, or overstrain, go so tragically wrong at the end. The somewhat wicked pun is common among medical men: “Five minutes with Venus may mean a lifetime with Mercury,” a specimen of sardonic jesting with death that so appeals to many doctors, however kindly and serious they may really be.

In no way can we better trace his degeneration than in his treatment of his wives; so I propose to describe it alone of all his innumerable misdeeds.

Firstly, it is a great mistake to suppose that the only nervous result of syphilis is general paralysis. Among neurotic people it may cause serious mental troubles although it may not affect the actual brain-tissue so far as we can see with a microscope. As this is perhaps not generally known, I quote a sentence from the Oxford Textbook of the Practice of Medicine, by various authors, published in 1922. “Such patients are generally psychasthenic, ill-balanced and degenerate.” The writer is speaking of the effects of syphilis upon mental diseases, and its propensity to cause “phobias” and “obsessions.”

His first wife was Catherine of Aragon, who was some six years older than himself. After a fierce struggle with the pope the obliging Archbishop Cranmer pronounced a divorce between them. Martin Hume considers that this was entirely for personal reasons, because she had lost her personal charms, and because Henry had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. Probably there was a great deal of the personal element in it, and it is quite possible that if Catherine had been willing to go into a convent and leave her husband to another woman—he actually proposed that the pope should allow him two wives—there might not have been the divorce that has been fruitful of such stupendous results for England. Catherine seems to have been a woman much under the influence of Spanish religiosity, and undoubtedly put up a strenuous fight to keep her husband; as was only right and proper. Probably the real degeneration in the king was yet to come; the spirochæte was still biding its time.

Since there seems to be a good deal of doubt about the exact dates of the famous premature births of Catherine, I give from Professor Pollard her actual record. On January 31st, 1510, seven months after marriage, she gave birth to a daughter still-born. Eleven months later, on January 1st, 1511, there was a son, who died in three days, as is still said because of the inordinate length of his christening. In September, 1513, there was another son, who was either still-born, or died immediately after it was born. In June, 1514, there was yet another son, but he, too, was no sooner christened than dead. Then, on February 18th, 1516, came the little Princess who, being born to misery, became “Bloody Mary.” Then, in 1517 “it is probable that there were several miscarriages.” On November 18th, 1518, came the last of the unhappy woman’s efforts. It was a boy and still-born. And Catherine was by now forty years of age and obviously could have no more children. She had done her best, poor lady, but found her husband’s spirochætes too much for her.

General experience is that the tendency in constitutional syphilis is to cause a string of prematurely born children or miscarriages; then a child born at full time, but showing evidences of disease; then, the tendency having worn itself out, one or more backward but seemingly healthy children. But, after Mary was born, apparently the tendency still remained. Probably local internal trouble still persisted in Catherine, and she had not entirely worn out the infection. Undoubtedly a good modern surgeon would have cured her and altered the history of England. That the stout-hearted daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella actually died of the syphilis which she had probably gained from her husband would appear to be shown by the account of the post-mortem examination which was secretly held by a man who was trying to prove that Henry VIII had poisoned her. He reported after getting the body ready for embalming, that she was all sound but the heart, which was “black and hideous, with a black excrescence which clung closely to the outside.” Doubtless this represented an aortic aneurysm, which is known to be a common result of untreated syphilis. I know that the findings have been attributed to cancer of the heart; but cancer of the heart is so rare, if it ever occurs, while aneurysm is so common, that I prefer the interpretation here given.

I regret that my little essay on Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, has been much misunderstood by readers of Post Mortem. The view I there took was that if the stories about her were true they could only be explained by the supposition that she was suffering from nymphomania. Nymphomania does not necessarily imply that a girl is of abandoned character; it is a pathological condition of the nervous system. To this day it sometimes comes on after childbirth, especially if accompanied by terror and anxiety. It is in these women part of the Curse of Eve.[4] It may happen to any woman, and sometimes causes scandal before it is discovered. What circumstances could be imagined more terrible than those in which the tragic second queen found herself.

Henry had married her in hopes of gaining a son and heir in spite of the curse which people believed lay upon him for the multifarious premature births of her predecessor, or rather for the mortal sin of marrying his deceased brother’s wife. Still further to complicate the matter, Catherine of Aragon had sworn that she had never had connection with the dead Prince Arthur at all. Truly the whole thing becomes more and more complex as we gaze. A canon law which looked upon a carnal act as a deed which must be sanctified by God whenever it was performed, either before or after marriage; a girl who desired to be queen; another older woman who fought fiercely for her rights as both wife and religious fanatic; a multitude of fierce partisans; racial, political, and religious animosities; over all a man enraged by “love,” fear, and brutality. Who could get at the truth about poor little Anne’s marriage? It is impossible; one can only sympathise with everybody, and try to understand.

As I said, if the stories are true they can only be explained on pathological grounds. What girl in her senses would go rushing about the Court soliciting promiscuously in the manner of which Anne is accused? Mr. Philip W. Sergeant has written a book to prove that all the stories are really based upon slanders set agoing by Chapuys, ambassador of Charles V; and it was to fierce religious and political animosity that Anne owed her bad reputation. According to him she was really a rather vindictive, free-spoken woman, a great worker with her hands, fond of dress, musical, and passionately fond of dancing. This is a new outlook on the Anne of Froude and most historians, but is confirmed by several known facts. For instance, some of her laborious needlework is said to be still preserved in Hampton Court Palace. I have not seen it, for it is many years since I was at that palace; but it must be very sad to gaze upon it and think how tragic was the fate of Mr. Sergeant’s dancing, singing, industrious little queen.

Another thing upon further reflection rather casts doubt even on the pathological explanation. Froude accused her of soliciting Sir Henry Norreys after the birth of Elizabeth—if I remember rightly, it was less than three weeks afterwards. Is it conceivable that Sir Henry Norreys would be allowed alone into Her Majesty’s sick-room only three weeks after the greatest event of any woman’s life—the birth of her first-born?

A lady who claims to be an Irish descendant of that George Boleyn who was accused of adultery and incest with Anne has written a long and interesting letter concerning her family and Anne in particular. Narrating the family traditions—and, as she says, family traditions must always be accorded great value—she tells me that the descendants of George Boleyn hold strongly that Anne may have been a gay little flirt, but that there was never anything really morally wrong with her; and that the whole accusation was in her own words—she is an American—a “frame-up” on the part of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Quite possibly, therefore, Anne may really have given nothing more than nods and becks and wreathed smiles to the men who were accused of adultery with her; possibly even the musician, Mark Smeaton, may have had his confession wrung out of him entirely by torture and by Cromwell’s terrible personality.

The truth about her burial seems to be that she was not bundled into a cask as I heard from one of the caretakers at the Tower, but that she was hurriedly put into a partly filled box of arrows. According to Mr. Sergeant they dug up the box in 1876 and found her delicate skeleton, with slender bones and severed neck. It is all very tragic and very sad. The difficulty is that Cromwell seems to have taken care that all the evidence in her favour perished. We do not hear from her friends.

It was apparently during Queen Anne Boleyn’s reign that the first appearance began of that frightful physical degeneration in the King which so impressed all his contemporaries; and it was probably from that circumstance that Anne gained the discredit of being the great prime mover in his degeneration; it was not fair of Mr. P. C. Yorke, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, to say that she appealed only to his lower nature. Some woman when he was about fourteen had done so most effectually, and years later Anne had to suffer for it. He probably appealed to Anne through his music, for he was a skilled musician, and one of the anthems which he wrote is still performed in English cathedrals.

There are still one or two things to remark when dealing with Anne Boleyn. First of all there was the birth of Elizabeth when she expected and fervently prayed for a son; secondly, the next was a miscarriage, said to have been brought on by seeing Jane Seymour sitting on her husband’s knee; another account is that it was a son prematurely born through anxiety because of a fall that he had when riding. Again these premature births! One would have thought that the constitutional syphilis in Henry VIII must have long worn itself out by that time!

Last of all we must glance at the conduct of the very obliging Archbishop Cranmer. He pronounced the decree of divorce—which, by the way, neither Catherine nor Henry himself ever seems to have recognised. Then he was present when Anne and Henry were married secretly. Then, when Anne, looking upon him as a friend, appealed to him in her desperate trouble at the end, he sent her a non-committal answer. As Mr. Sergeant dryly comments, it has only recently been proposed that this obliging man be made a saint of the Anglican Church.

There can be little doubt of the reason why Henry married Jane Seymour. Before he got Anne put out of harm’s way he had fallen in love, as he called it, with Jane; and the Seymours, being very powerful people who, observing that the king’s passions were already all-powerful with him (owing to his illness), took advantage of them to see that he married the new star, simply for the sake of their own particular sect, which happened to be Catholic. Here we see at once the fact that Henry, who thought himself so strong, was in reality already at the mercy of party politics.

Jane Seymour seems to have been a nondescript sort of woman, gentle and harmless. At the end of about a year she was delivered of the little son who, because his father’s syphilis had seemingly worn itself out, passed through the perils of his infancy only to die ultimately of what looks very much like pulmonary tuberculosis, the other curse of the Tudors. Childbirth killed the colourless Jane Seymour, undoubtedly through puerperal septicæmia, though once again the cock-and-bull story of an overlong christening has been revived.

Next came Anne of Cleves, the famous “great Flanders mare” of legendary reputation, of whom we have all learned at school. Again, according to Major Hume, Henry was so worked upon by his political advisers that he for once made an utter fool of himself, and married a picture by Holbein procured by Thomas Cromwell. In recommending this marriage Cromwell took a great risk, for, as is well known, no man can select either wife, pipe or hat for another. It is said that Henry had proposed to the French ambassador that he should hold a sort of Babylonian marriage-market among the damsels of France, whence he should select the prettiest; but it is also said, by Professor Pollard this time, that the Frenchman made such an answer that for the only recorded time in his life, Henry was seen to blush. It is difficult to imagine such a jape—even if French—as would make Henry Tudor blush.

The important thing to tell about Anne of Cleves is that Henry, having passed several nights in her room, proclaimed that he had discovered that she was not virgo intacta. There are also several indecent stories that he was said to have related of her, but as they are not entirely germane to my present object, and as I do not wish this to be a mere chronique scandaleuse I omit them.

While he was thus uncertain, being almost in the position of Hajji Baba when he discovered that he had married a veiled woman who turned out to be excessively plain, Henry again strove for freedom. He secured it by simply repudiating his bride on the Euripidean method of “it was my tongue that swore,” not my soul. Anne seems to have been a good-natured sort of German frau who accepted the inevitable with a good grace, and doubtless she was not sorry to be left alone with her knitting. Henry gave her £4,000 a year and two country houses, and called her his sister. She was not above cracking a risky joke with her temporary husband when he became still more prodigious as to his size and gluttony. It was while he was worried about Anne that Luther announced that Squire Harry thought himself to be God.

Lady Catherine Howard was the most pitiful of all, as Anne Boleyn was the most tragic. Once again there was the inevitable see-saw of politics; Henry had got rid of Thomas Cromwell the Protestant by the simple method of cutting off his head in circumstances of unusual brutality even for the sixteenth century; and once more the Roman Catholics came on top. The result was the sacrifice of pretty Catherine Howard. That she was by far the best looking of all Henry’s wives can hardly be denied. Nobody looking at her gentle and thoughtful little face in the portrait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery would ever dream that she was so immoral as people tried to prove. Her eyes were hazel, her hair was auburn; and she looks as virginal as though she had never been near the Court. Yet she was said to have had entanglements with at least three men. She had had a very unhappy childhood, and received due thrashings from her aunt the Duchess of Norfolk when that lady took a fancy to bestow them; but little education. She had no maternal supervision to keep her on the straight and narrow path in that sinful Court. Her music master, Mannock, boasted that she had promised to be his mistress; a kinsman named Dereham said that she was his wife; and she was reported to be engaged to her cousin, Culpepper. And now she was bestowed upon this new and dreadful suitor, His Gracious Majesty[5] himself. No wonder that Martin Hume became almost dithyrambic about it. Indeed, Catherine Howard had a hard fate.

I quote directly from Professor Pollard, who mercifully glosses over the piteous details. “Rumours of Catherine Howard’s past indiscretions had at length reached the ears of the privy council.... Twenty-four hours later Cranmer put in his hands the evidence of the queen’s misconduct. Henry refused to believe it in the rude awakening from his dreams; he ordered a strict investigation to be made. Its results left no room for doubt. Dereham confessed his intercourse; Mannock admitted having taken liberties; and finally the queen herself confessed her guilt. The king was overwhelmed with grief and vexation, and shed bitter tears. He offered his wife a pardon and she might have escaped with nothing worse than a divorce had not proofs come to hand of her misconduct with Culpepper during Henry’s recent absence in the north. This offence was high treason and could not be covered by Henry’s pardon for her prenuptial immorality.” Henry feared lest the blood royal be contaminated. In January, 1542, Parliament considerately relieved this blubbering and neurotic man of his responsibility by “passing an Act of Attainder directed against his new wife, which, to save him pain, was signed by a Commission in his stead. Catherine declined his permission to go down to the house of Parliament and defend herself in person.” In due course she was beheaded in the Tower. The story is that she said, “I had rather die a Culpepper than live a Queen.” Doubtless in confessing at the back of her mind was the thought that it were better to be dead than to be married to King Henry VIII at the moment that his mental syphilis was approximating to its greatest terrors with all its obsessions and phobias. Seemingly the Parliament of England was not always so brave as we now think it to be. But if he knew so much about women as he had professed in the case of his repudiation of Anne of Cleves, why had he not applied his knowledge to the case of Catherine Howard before?

It seems a reasonable thing to glance at the other symptoms of syphilis that occurred at the time during the reign of Catherine Howard when his greatest degeneracy was coming on.

The ulcer on his leg sometimes closed, and the pain was so intense that he sometimes became speechless with agony and went black in the face.[6] He grew more and more corpulent every day. When he went on progress to the north he cleared the Tower by issuing orders that every prisoner in it was to be beheaded. If these in an absolute monarch are not symptoms of syphilitic psychasthenia, of a frightful moral and physical degeneration, what are they? Symptoms of whooping-cough, perhaps!

Next and last came Catherine Parr, who was said to have been degraded to the royal bed by the Protestants to gain their own ends. She must have been a brave woman to tackle the task of nursing this man, whose temper by that time was like that of a wild beast owing to his obsessions and phobias. She was no beauty; she was short in stature, but gifted with amazing tact. She had already been twice a widow, so evidently she thought she understood the art of nursing and managing men, even such a man as her new husband. She is said to have been at the time in love with Sir Thomas Seymour, whom she married after Henry’s death, only to die in a short time of puerperal fever. She reconciled Henry to his daughter, Elizabeth, and is said to have kept the peace between her and the Princess Mary. We are told that she once had a theological dispute with the king; a risky thing to do. “A good hearing it is,” said Henry, “when women become such clerks; and a fine thing it is to be taught in mine old days by my wife.” Catherine explained that what she had said was merely intended to “minister talk”; so Henry answered, “Is it so, sweetheart; then we are friends again,” and when Lord Chancellor Wriothesley came to arrest her Henry called him beast, knave and fool. She must indeed have been a remarkably clever woman, whatever her religious opinions.

As to his death it is quite impossible to get at the real truth. He had sent the Duke of Norfolk to the Tower and had ordered his execution to be fixed for February 28th, 1546. But, alas, on the 27th Henry lay dying. The exact details are so squabbled over for purposes of sectarianism, that it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood. It is said on the one side that he died in an agony of conscience; on the other that Archbishop Cranmer came to ask him to give some token of his belief in Jesus Christ. The king is said to have roused himself from his stupor and pressed Cranmer’s hand. While there are not sufficient details to offer an opinion it is possible that his stupor was uræmic, due to the slow degeneration of his kidneys during the many years that his body and mind had been degenerating. But one would prefer to have some independent authority for the statement that the dying man understood sufficient of what Cranmer was saying to him to press his hand at the mention of the blessed name of Christ.

To the best of my ability and in accordance with the best modern historical knowledge, I have drawn as honestly as I can the true character of Henry VIII, Defender of the Faith, as seen by a doctor. There are many stories told about him that I purposely have omitted from fear of being accused of exaggeration. But the general atmosphere of lust, obscenity, grandiose ideas, such as were noticed by Luther, and violence combined with cowardice, especially about disease, is all very typical of syphilis; one might almost call it diagnostic. He never became an indecent honest lunatic such as Ivan the Terrible, for ingenious historians who know the exact circumstances so far as anybody can know them at this time of day, are still able to find logical reasons for even the most dreadful of his actions. He did not become terrible; he became loathsome. To use the words of a witty journalist friend of mine he was not Henry the Terrible; he was Henry the Horrible. He is the one man who ever disproved Shakespeare’s vaunt:

“This England never did nor never shall

Lie at the proud feet of a conqueror.”

For if England did not lie at the proud and probably dropsical feet of this obsessional syphilitic with doubtless a gigantic blood-pressure to add to his bad temper, words have no meaning.

The whole conduct of the English people throughout the Reformation is a beautiful example of the working of Dr. Wilfrid Trotter’s herd instinct. Like a swarm of bees England swept this way and that, uncertain how to fly, looking for a resting-place where it might start the new era just as the swarm searches for a place to start a new hive; and then, suddenly, with no obvious reason, darts upon its way, upon the usual English way of a compromise which doubtfully satisfies the strongest party.

It adds to the remark of R. L. Stevenson’s cynical old Frenchman: “The English are a stupid people who have sometimes blundered into good.”

How many men lost their lives owing to Henry’s syphilitic obsessions and phobias it is quite impossible to say. The comparatively slight derangement of judgment in those tyrannical times may have meant the block for scores. Perhaps when Sir Thomas More said, “Her Majesty Queen Anne Boleyn may dance and sing but her turn may still shortly come,” the acutest mind in England perceived that his king was not entirely normal in mind.

Henry VIII was never a despot. If the law did not allow him to do as he wished, he simply got Parliament to alter it for him.

Edward VI

This poor little boy, in whom all the tragedy of the Tudors seems to have concentrated itself, was born to Henry VIII and Queen Jane Seymour in 1537. Henry had already forgiven himself for his conduct to Anne Boleyn, and was deeply attached to his new queen; during the progress of the christening he sat by the side of his wife and held her hand in order that she might not be too exhausted by the strain. She, poor thing, had to wear a great gown of ermine, and to sit upright on a state pallet to welcome and bless her little son as the service terminated. But her loving arms could not save him; already within him were implanted the seeds of death, a tuberculous tendency from his grandfather, Henry VII, and actual spirochetes from his father, Henry VIII. And, as Queen Jane clutched him to her bosom, she herself began to shiver; no doubt she thought her shivering was from fear lest she lose her son; but within a week of his birth she lay dead, probably from puerperal septicæmia. Henry was heart-broken; but at least the curse of the Church had been lifted; he could now honestly say that he had begotten a legitimate and living son, and that the succession of the English throne was safe. Where the brilliant little Anne Boleyn had failed, this commonplace and featureless Queen Jane, so colourless that everybody liked her, or at least did not hate her, had succeeded. So she being dead, Henry at once communicated with the Court of France in order to get him another wife, if possible; that the Pope might see how impotent he was to affect human destiny. This was not because he was incurably lustful, but because it was still important to have another heir, should little Edward turn sick and die. Already, one thinks, the English Prometheus was scaling Olympus with determined, though engrossed, footsteps; already Zeus might well tremble at the ponderous footfalls of this fat and syphilitic man.

But little Edward did not seem likely to die; for, to all appearances he was a strong and healthy little boy. If the Court of England had purposely meant to deny that Edward was syphilitic it could not have chosen better words to do it in, for, as the message announcing the glad news of his progress said, “he sucketh like a child of puissance.” In the typical infantile hereditary syphilis the baby suffers from “snuffles,” and its sucking powers are, to say the least, inadequate. But the spirochæte has other ways of taking its revenge upon its host. It may lie latent for years, and so poison the child’s resisting powers that he falls an easy victim to some deadly bacterium. In the case of little Edward it seems to have been the tubercle bacillus that first seized upon its chance; and when, fifteen years later, just after puberty, it was working its deadly will upon him the spirochæte of syphilis joined the assault.

Edward was an affectionate little boy, of good impulses. Of course it was unthinkable that a prince should ever be flogged; so the fond father appointed a whipping-boy to act vicariously in his stead. It was Barnaby Fitzpatrick who was honoured by receiving the royal thrashings, though Edward was such a good little boy that Barnaby was seldom called upon for duty, and grew up a firm friend of the little king who might have suffered in his person but for him. Edward’s wet-nurse was a motherly woman whom he later called his “mother-jak.” I do not know what childish utterance that may have represented, but it is silly enough a term to have come from the mouths of babes and sucklings. At eleven months old no less a personage than Thomas Cromwell visited him officially and, no doubt, dandled him upon his knee. Says Cromwell’s secretary, speaking of this time, “And I do assure your lordship that I never saw so goodly a child of his age; so merry, so good and loving a countenance, and so earnest an eye, as it were exercising a judgment towards every person who repaireth to his grace; and, as it seemeth to me, his grace encreaseth well in the air where he is.” (Already he had been sent to the country for his health.) “And, albeit a little of his grace’s flesh decayeth, yet he shooteth out in length and waxeth firm and stiff and he can steadfastly stand.” So clearly he was a nice little boy of eleven months, if anything rather forward for his age.

When he was about two, his father, the king, used to take his little son in his arms and stand at the window to show the multitude how bravely his boy was fighting life; and the crowd would clap and cheer for joy, for King Henry VIII was still beloved, and the Tudor succession was at every Englishman’s heart; the awful mental and physical degeneration in the king was still to come, and there is no more delightful scene in Henry VIII’s life than that of him standing at the window holding up his son to be cheered by the crowd. How little we really know of our public men! Who could have foretold that this smiling king was to become the most murderous tyrant who ever sat upon the throne of England? For the present let him be glad, and his little son with him, smiling and chuckling with true Tudor tact. The tragedy to both comes soon enough.

Some time before this, the proud wet-nurse announced that her foster-child “has three teeth and a fourth appeareth.” I cannot discover the exact age at which this announcement was made. It would be interesting to know whether his dentition was entirely normal; but probably little Edward seemed normal enough. When he came to be educated the amount of learning that was stuffed into that poor child’s head was simply amazing—worthy of Elizabeth; worthy of bluff King Hal himself. He could speak both Latin and Greek; he habitually wrote in Latin, and could translate a Latin author into Attic Greek. For his friend he selected little Jane Dormer, a girl of his own age; the two ran about and played together. The two made a pretty picture, if you can forget the fate that was hanging over the little boy. He kept a journal, and a day came, April 2nd, 1552, when he noted “this day I fell sick of the measles and the smallpox.” The young diagnostician must have been very sure of his insight. The fact that two dissimilar eruptions came out on the little boy at the same time rather seems to indicate that there was some other toxin at work, probably syphilitic.

As he grew up he began to show signs of both obstinacy and religiosity, which, with a little encouragement, might have become as fanatic as those of Mary Tudor herself and led to a real good old sixteenth-century religious persecution. It was perhaps fortunate for England that the clever little boy died before he could do any real mischief. We know a great deal about his actual death. For a long time his health had been failing; he was racked with a constant and incurable cough, and apparently showed all the symptoms of a rapid consumption. The regular doctors having failed to cure him, England’s Majesty was entrusted to the care of a woman who professed to have acquired possession of a cure-all. Under her treatment the king became rapidly worse. “His legs swelled, his complexion became sallow, his hair fell out; the terminal joints of his fingers fell off” (syphilitic dactylitis?). “Eruptions came out on his skin, and he lost his fingers.” The luckless laundress who washed his shirts also suffered from terrible things; she lost her nails and the skin off her fingers, which gave rise to the suspicion that some one had been trying to poison the king her employer. But probably either she had been using some cheap soap or else she had syphilis herself. So, the quack having proved that her cure-all was doing the king more harm than good, was sent about her business, and the regular doctors were recalled. Froude thought that she had been using some mineral poison, and that in truth Edward VI had actually been poisoned by her, though not intentionally. As for me, I am quite prepared to believe that she had somehow got hold of a preparation of mercury which she was using on the light-hearted assumption, which was probably true, that in 1550 everybody was suffering from syphilis, and that when she tried it on Edward’s form, already wasted and powerless by the long struggle with tuberculosis, the spirochætes that had been lying latent within him suddenly became active during the “storms of puberty” with the terrifying results that we have just seen. Possibly the woman may have bragged of her discovery about mercury; and everybody would at once say, “See what you are doing to our beloved young king with your mineral poisons!” There is much virtue in a name. Call mercury a “mineral poison,” and it is at once damned as much as if you had called it a “drug.” But vegetable poisons are far worse than mineral poisons; yet nobody dreams of saying that we should not take strychnine to “buck us up,” nor morphine to relieve us of intolerable pain. Probably it was that woman’s hard luck that she tried mercury at the very moment when the king’s latent syphilis was about to come to the surface; and no doubt it was just such incidents as this which have given to mercury such a bad name, that the moment one prescribes it the patient always says, “Not mercury, doctor, please.”

But that unfortunate woman was dismissed and the regular practitioners returned to their prey with the good old sixteenth-century remedies for coughs, which, if they could not cure, would certainly not bring the patient all out in a rash. The rumour went about that they were poisoning the king, that he was already dead. As young Edward lay gasping and coughing and sweating on his death-bed his attendants said to him that it would be wise for him to let himself be seen; so, with true Tudor sense of duty, he dragged himself to the window and looked out at the crowd waiting like ghouls to hear that he was dead. When they saw his face, grey, pinched and dying, the crowd cheered as it cheered when it saw him held up in his father’s arms. Though some cheered, yet some held to it that a man who could look so ghastly must be dead, and indeed the rumour that he was dead was but confirmed by the sight of him.

His last prayer was “O Lord God, free me, I beseech you, from this calamitous life.” What was that poor young lad doing that he had already begun to wonder why he had ever been born, as many men have wondered about themselves since him? Tuberculosis of the lungs is often accompanied by a sense of euphoria, that is to say, the patient does not feel so ill as he should feel. But syphilis of the lung is gloomy enough, and sometimes gives rise to symptoms indistinguishable from tuberculosis. On the whole, therefore, I might rather be inclined to hazard a guess that it was syphilis of the lung that killed little Edward VI. I grant that this guess might be based mainly on that sad prayer, coupled with all the other symptoms that I have narrated. Then, after he had been trying to look upon his subjects with eyes that probably saw nothing, he suddenly cried, “I faint—Lord, receive my soul,” and fell back dead.

But is it not rather fantastic to summon either in particular of the two Earthly Twins, tubercle and syphilis, to the final assault, especially a manifestation of syphilis so rare as syphilis of the lung? These two form an alliance when it occurs that is not like the alliance of States; they do not quarrel, but never let go their grip until the patient dies. And it is in an alliance between delayed hereditary syphilis and pulmonary tuberculosis that we must probably seek for the death of Edward VI.

Probably it was lucky for him, and lucky for England that he died; and he did well by wondering why he was ever born. How much more violently would the wonder of life have shocked him when he came to learn how thorny is the path of a man who is too religious! Sed Dis aliter visum. It needed no inscrutable wisdom on the part of the Almighty to realise that Edward Tudor was “better dead.”

Mary Tudor

I have already discussed the character of this unhappy woman in Post Mortem. To the psychology that I there enunciated I have nothing to add; and I still believe that if she had not been for so long an old maid, if she had not been neglected by Philip II, or if she had been married, as she probably would have preferred, to Charles V, England would not have had occasion to call her “Bloody Mary.” She but supplies another instance, if one were needed, that religion and sex[7] are not far apart.

For details as to her physical health I am indebted to the British Medical Journal for 1910, where there appeared that noteworthy series of articles on Royal Deathbeds which has been so useful to historically minded doctors.

As a child she was always sickly, though as she grew up she had to undergo the rigid mental discipline that Henry enforced on all his children. Being a very learned man himself, he naturally tried to imbue them with his own hunger for knowledge; and all three rivalled their father in intellectual endeavour.

With better fortune, better health, and perhaps we might say with a less exacting father, Mary might have been as great as he. Instead her really great parts turned her into the road of tyranny and persecution, and “Bloody Mary” she will remain for all time.

The “storms of puberty” that had shattered the frail barque of Edward VI, and brought his latent spirochætes to the surface, beat hard upon Mary’s body, and left her an embittered and sickly woman, with an intellect below her station, and a conscience above it. But what she mistook for the love of God—religion—was probably a love more fleshly; the desire of the moth for the star, as Shelley puts it poetically. Indeed, it is difficult to describe this primitive instinct in language that shall not be poetical; the great brain of man has idealised love until it is the emotion furthest from prose that humanity is capable of suffering; and that which is originally common to man and the brutes becomes the noblest feeling of the human brain; transcendental. And when again sublimated it may lead to the fiercest of injustices, to the most savage of religious persecutions. To that goal it led Mary Tudor, the most unhappy woman in English history.

As a girl she suffered from menstrual troubles that caused her great pain; her normal menstruation was often scanty; and this has been attributed to overstudy. To this day we find that any overstrain, or even a sudden change of climate, may cause amenorrhœa in a young woman; many of our English girl-immigrants, having left the depths of an English summer for the mildness of a Sydney winter, suddenly terrify their friends by becoming amenorrhœic, often to their unfounded mental distress. Later on she suffered from what she called her “old guest,” of which the chief symptom was amenorrhœa. The probability is that soon after her marriage with Philip she really did become pregnant, and miscarried. The disappointment weighed heavily on her mind. Was it possible that she, who was so earnest, virtuous and religious, should be affected by the same curse as the wives of her father? She became cachectic—that is to say, her complexion assumed the ashy hue of a person dying of cancer; and her abdomen swelled as though she were again pregnant. Sir Spencer Wells in 1877 hazarded the guess that she probably suffered from “ovarian dropsy,” an old-fashioned term for what we should now call “parovarian cyst,” a tumour that takes its origin from a little body adjacent to the ovary, and, being distended with fluid, causes enormous swelling of the abdomen. It is the one abdominal tumour which, if tapped, may possibly not return, and the patient may be cured with no further ado.

For years before she died she had suffered from very bad health; she was never well, and could never attend to her work properly, owing to the terrible headaches that afflicted her; these were possibly due to her bad eyesight. With these also went palpitation of the heart. She never became old, for she died at forty-two; and most likely the proverb was as true with her as it still is with every young person—“If you feel your heart, it is not your heart; it is something else, generally your stomach.”

It is quite true that she, like Charles V, felt the loss of Calais desperately; her exact words to her ladies-in-waiting were, “When I am opened you will find Calais lying on my heart.” Probably the fluttering at her heart put the idea into her head; and equally probably that fluttering ultimately came from her pelvic distress, which in turn would doubtless cause indigestion. We often see similar cases to-day.

Her father had compelled her to sign a statement that his marriage with Catherine of Aragon had been “by God’s law and man’s incestuous and unlawful”; thereby forcing her to declare herself a bastard. The parliament of her brother Edward VI passed an Act of Uniformity that enjoined services in English and did not permit of the Mass. To Mary, as a devout Roman Catholic, this appeared to be a form of persecution. She therefore appealed to her cousin the Emperor who intervened on her behalf, as he had tried to intervene on behalf of her mother during the divorce. But this time he was more successful, for he threatened England with war unless Mary’s freedom of worship was restored to her, and her right of hearing Mass in her own chapel after the old canons. It is easy to see that the great Tudor dictator was dead and that only a sick woman sat on his throne. But Mary seems to have had no approximately impartial adviser. Throughout her reign she had no one to help her but the Emperor, who, great as he was, could not be called impartial in those dreadful times.

She was by no means personally cruel; she was lenient to political prisoners and restored out of her own privy purse some of the monasteries which her father had robbed. When her tumour—if it was a tumour—returned, in 1557, she drew up a will in expectation of the dangers of childbirth. She added a codicil to this in October, 1558, which showed that she had abandoned all hope of children. Her husband had not returned to her after he had gone to Belgium to see Charles V abdicate, and the elderly wife at last saw that no child of hers was to govern England.

In 1558 she suffered from what was then called “the new burning ague,” which is now thought to have been the influenza; in that year it was raging in England, killing thousands of people.

She died suddenly in November, 1558, in full possession of her mind, while she was hearing Mass in her own private chamber, a right that she had won after such bitter struggles. Although no post-mortem examination was held, it is generally thought that she died of an ovarian tumour, though that is not likely to be correct, because an ovarian tumour would not cause sudden death. Nor is there any record of any sickness that would cause a heart disease that might kill her suddenly, unless perhaps the influenza may have weakened her heart. I rather fancy that my own guess is correct as given in Post Mortem that she died of “degeneration of heart and arteries,” not necessarily but probably syphilitic and inherited from her father.

Any doctor looking at the portrait of her wizened, lined, and prematurely aged face would probably say, “That woman must have been a hereditary syphilitic,” especially if he knew the history of Henry VIII. I am surprised to see that in the actual record of her life there appears to be none of the usual symptoms of hereditary syphilis beyond the general ill-health that was hers all her days, poor creature. Doubtless the illness in her father was working itself out by the time that she was born.

But she was very short-sighted; and possibly, as Sir Clifford Allbutt points out, this may have been due to “interstitial keratitis,” an affection of the cornea of the eye which is almost confined to hereditary syphilitics. So that in Mary also we see the effects of the “tragedy of the Tudors.” I am certain that that wizened face must come from hereditary syphilis, because one of the first patients I ever had looked extraordinarily like Mary Tudor, and the swellings on her arms for which she consulted me melted rapidly under the influence of mercury. Her photograph lies in my desk to this day as a perfect illustration of delayed hereditary syphilis.

Queen Elizabeth

No decent man would add to the slanders that have been passed upon this extraordinary woman, who stood at the head of the English nation when it was engaged in one of its fiercest struggles for very existence. These slanders are so numerous in quantity, but in quality so much alike, that they may all be summed up in one—slander against her sexual morality. Professor Chamberlin[(2)], evidently considering that the morals of a great queen of the sixteenth century should resemble those of a great queen of the nineteenth, spent many years in ascertaining the nature of the sicknesses from which she was said to have suffered. The farrago of somewhat quackish-sounding symptoms that he discovered has no meaning in modern medicine. She has been slandered quite enough, poor lady, and I for one shall not add anything to it. Rather than seek an explanation for the innumerable contemporary physiological slanders I propose to see whether they are possible.

They may be said to have been summed up by the kindest, most gentle and most sympathetic of historians, Professor A. F. Pollard[(1)], whose immense industry and meticulous fairness will at once absolve him from any obvious conscious bias, sectarian or otherwise. Writing of her extraordinary juggling with her numerous suitors he says: “There is evidence that she had no option in the matter and that a physical defect precluded her from hopes of issue. On this supposition her conduct becomes intelligible, her irritation at parliamentary pressure on the subject pardonable, and her outburst on the news of Mary Stuart’s motherhood a welcome sign of genuine feeling. Possibly there was a physical cause for Elizabeth’s masculine mind and temper, and for the curious fact that no man lost his head over her as many did over Mary Queen of Scots. To judge from portraits, Mary was as handsome as her rival; but apparently Elizabeth had no feminine fascination, and even her extravagant addiction to the outward trappings of her sex may have been due to the absence or atrophy of deeper feminine feelings. The impossibility of marriage made her all the freer with her flirtations, and she carried some of them to lengths which scandalized a public unconscious of Elizabeth’s real security.”

To analyse such remarkable slanders as those passed by Mary Queen of Scots[(3)], and many years after Elizabeth’s death by Ben Jonson[(4)] in his tipsy tattling would need a paper more suited for a gynæcological journal than for general publication. Without emulating Ben by going into unpleasant physical details I content myself by saying that so far as I know there is no physical defect of the female form obvious to the sufferer which will preclude hope of offspring, and yet allow her to reach the age of nearly seventy. Before coming to that conclusion the author laid down four postulates to himself[8] which will occur to every critically minded doctor; and it seems to him that every suggestion fails miserably in at least one of these postulates. And since, when tested in this way, every slander founded on the physical appearance of her body necessarily fails, it is equally possible that the suspicions thus based may be equally without foundation. Such rumours about her are founded upon a lamentable want of knowledge of woman’s physiological and anatomical necessities.[(11)]

It seems to me, that we can gather better evidence from contemporary portraits than from contemporary religious slanders; it is well known that whenever sixteenth-century religion came in at the door objective truth flew out at the window. No one can study the beautiful portrait of Queen Elizabeth which Miss Gwen John allows me to publish without thinking: “That is not the portrait of a loose woman! She may have been cruel, vindictive, merciless, but she cannot have been loose and sensual.”

Her amazing personality is best explained by the new science of the ductless glands—endocrinology.[9] Sometimes she seems to have had all the male qualities, such as swearing, roughness of speech, freedom from convention. Sometimes she seems to have behaved like a doting old maid, in her inordinate love of dress, jewellery, and flattery. Rather than believe that she was abnormal in form, which I think to be impossible considering the known facts of her physiology, I find it easier to believe that in some way her “endocrine balance” was abnormal. It is now rather more than suspected that no individual is entirely male or entirely female; the psychic qualities of both sexes are more or less mingled in everybody, and thus we could easily explain the remarkable fact noted by Professor Pollard that no man ever seems to have fallen in love with Elizabeth sufficiently to risk his head for her. A century before, Owen Tudor fell in love with Katherine of Valois[(7)], and risked death by marrying her secretly. But no such vehement lover appeared for Elizabeth; and, if he had, her want of “endocrine balance” would not have prevented her from child-bearing. When she shouted to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, “God’s death, villain, I’ll have thy head,”[(3)] the violence of the male in her came to the surface; when she fondled and fooled with the Duke of Alençon and called him her “little frog”[(6)] and other silly names, the doting old maid in her was paramount. Major Hume considers that it was with the Duke of Alençon that Elizabeth was in love for the first and only time in her life; and it is quite possible.

The only thing that my speculation does not explain is the bitter cry from the heart that was wrung from her when she heard of the birth of King James I to her great rival, Mary Queen of Scots: “The Queen of Scots is the lighter of a fair son, but I am a barren stock!”[(3)] How did she know? Was she thinking of the amazing number of miscarriages that befell two of her father’s wives, which to us now appear such certain evidence that he was probably suffering from constitutional syphilis? That is the best suggestion I am able to make.

Innumerable attempts have been made to explain the slanders upon Queen Elizabeth, from Miss Gwen John’s explanation given in her little play, “The Prince,”[(12)] that probably they arose from accidental episodes that occurred when she was about her normal duties at Court, to Major Hume’s idea—which is generally held—that they were the result of purposeful “hoaxing” by the Great Queen, all done for the sake of her country. True, like her father Henry VIII, Elizabeth was very patriotic; but, as one of Professor Chamberlin’s doctors suggests, it is difficult to distinguish between her patriotism and her desire to keep her own head on her shoulders. So far as I know the present suggestion—that the contemporary rumours about her physical malformation were impossible—has never been put forward before. It again leaves the field open for those who are able to estimate the effects of sectarian enthusiasm upon the human mind to find some other explanation than a physical malformation.

Her character has been so much besmirched by slander that we are sometimes apt to forget that in reality she was as clever and intellectual as her great father in his youth. She knew several languages, and to seek consolation in the worries that necessarily befell her it is said that she translated Boëthius’ “Consolatio Philosophiæ.”[(9)]

If we are to remember her as the man-struck old maid who philandered with and petted her favourites, it is equally well for us to remember her as the intellectual woman who was able to translate a deep philosophical work. The extremely intellectual qualities that one finds in Elizabeth are sometimes forgotten in the whirlwind of sectarian slander and patriotism that had centred itself on her head. Possibly the reason why she fixed upon Boëthius for translation—he had already been done by Chaucer—is because he wrote his great “consolation” in prison while he was awaiting the Roman executioner. Perhaps she thought that his case somewhat resembled her own.

Her dual personality came out strongly in her last words. According to Sir Sidney Lee they were “Ad inferos eat melancholia”—“To hell with melancholy.” Not long afterwards she fell into a deep coma[(10)]—probably caused by septic intoxication from an abscess in her tonsils, acting upon a woman whose arteries were much older than her years—and died in her sleep. In these words one sees the reckless courage that we suppose to be male, swearing and laughing in the face of death however unwelcome he may be, and the feminine desire to charm which led her to paint her face as she said them.

But after all, the best epitaph upon Elizabeth is the little verse that she scratched upon a windowpane at Woodstock Manor, where her loving sister Mary was “entertaining” her much as we entertained Napoleon at St. Helena:

“Much is suspected of me;

Nothing proved can be;

Elizabeth prisoner.”

And perhaps it is as well that nothing can be proved against the personal morality of one of the greatest women in history. One imagines that her wraith would laugh ironically at all our vain efforts, as her young girlhood evidently laughed at poor Mary as she scratched the words Elizabeth prisoner.[(5)]

I take from the British Medical Journal of 1910 the description of her actual death, because it is in accordance with my own experience of the deaths of fierce and obstinate old ladies.

Lady Southwell, one of her maids of honour, said: “She kept her bed for fifteen dayes besides the three dayes that she sat upon her stool without speaking; until one day, being pulled upon her feet by force, she stood upon her feet for fifteen hours. Her Majestie understood that Mr. Secretarie Cecil had given forth that she was mad; and therefore in her sickness she said ‘Cecill, know thou that I am not mad; you must not try to make Queen Jane of me.’” Queen Jane was “Crazy Jane,” mother of Charles V, and this recollection of the days of her youth, when Charles V was the greatest man in the world, is very characteristic of an old person. “And,” continues Lady Southwell, “though by Cecil’s means many stories were spread about that she was mad, myself, nor anie that were about me, could never see that her speeches, so well adapted, proved her distracted mind.”

Then they lifted her into bed; she fell asleep; and the last of the great personal monarchs of England died in coma. There was no sectarian nonsense about her waking from a stupor to press anybody’s hand, when all she wanted was to get on with her dying.

But though Elizabeth was so great and had such an astonishing effect on English history[(8)] it would be a mistake to turn her into the heroine of a sentimental novel.

(1) A. F. Pollard, Political History of England.

(2) F. Chamberlin, Private Character of Queen Elizabeth.

(3) F. Chamberlin, The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth.

(4) Ben Jonson, Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden.

(5) F. A. Mumby, Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth.

(6) M. S. Hume, Courtships of Queen Elizabeth.

(7) Mabel Christie, Henry VI.

(8) Rachel Taylor, Aspects of the Italian Renaissance.

(9) The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, June, 1924.

(10) Facts from the British Medical Journal, 1910; guess my own.

(11) Julian Huxley, Essays of a Biologist.

(12) Gwen John, The Prince.

Ivan the Terrible

The life of this criminal lunatic has been described so often, with so much journalistic horror, that I hesitate to offer the plain matter-of-fact comments of a doctor upon it.

In order to understand the Russia of the last few centuries, we must first of all glance at Russian history. Under the brutal yoke of the Mongols the Russians learned the worst extremes of cruelty to which the vanquished in an Oriental country must submit; for, their country laid waste by civil war and devastated by the Tartars, the whole people were familiar with bloodshed, misery and cruelty. A man’s children were his slaves, whom he could sell four times, and his wife and family lay under a sterner rule of fatherhood than ever obtained even in Rome or in Asia. Prisoners of war had to sell themselves as slaves lest they starve.

Ivan was born in 1530, son of Vassili Ivanovitch and Helena Glinska. One of his brothers was an imbecile, and his father was sullen, changeable, and savagely ferocious.

When Ivan was three years of age his father died, and, under the regency of his mother his education in vice began; indeed, it seems to have been prodigious. Although Helena seems to have done her best to protect him, he was encouraged by courtiers to yield to every form of self-indulgent vice that is possible to a young man. He used to watch with delight his dogs as they fell upon prisoners whom he had had thrown to them; and was constantly suspicious of the Boyars, or aristocrats, whom he suspected to have organised conspiracies against him. It is said that they used to organise their conspiracies either in the name of Ivan or of his mother; and they were opposed by their natural enemies, the trading classes. Hence it was that Ivan conceived a violent hatred and terror of the Boyars, and an equally foolish trust in the merchants. He had to suffer many indignities, and saw his favourites murdered before his eyes. Ivan struck back, until at last he captured one Shousky, last of the Boyars, and gleefully threw him to the dogs from the balcony whence he had often seen his prisoners eaten. A great fire broke out in Moscow in 1547, when Ivan was seventeen years old; seventeen hundred people perished in the flames. The populace rose in fury, accusing his grandmother and her sons of setting Moscow ablaze. Being a good grandson Ivan acted with vigour; he did not try to ascertain how far the old lady and his uncles were guilty, but incontinently seized upon the ringleaders of the people and put them to death as they deserved. In the midst of the pother a monk—one Sylvester—appeared. He seems to have been like one of those Oriental prophets who are said to have dared to tell the truth to kings. Bravely facing Ivan, he foretold the future in many visions and dreams; and warned Ivan that it was owing to his own misdeeds that Russia was suffering such tragic torments.

For some reason Ivan spared him, called together a synod of priests and other intelligentsia of Russia and asked for its aid in the government. Flattered, the synod drew up rules for its ruler; and the next ten years are pictured to us—possibly by friends of the synod—as a veritable quinquennium Neronis; though the period was longer than Nero’s. There was good government and outward prosperity; the army was reformed; a new code of laws was devised; a printing press was established; Archangel was founded; trade with England was set afoot through the White Sea; by victories in Livonia the frontier was pushed towards the Baltic; fortresses against the Tartars were established in the Crimea; and the Turks were driven back. In these wars Ivan IV showed himself to be a great and able general; a worthy predecessor of that Peter the Great who was soon to come after him.

But this was too good to last. In 1552 his wife died: Anastasia, first of the Romanoffs, the woman, as it would now seem, who saved Russia by protecting the Tsar from harpies. Ivan was heart-broken. He suspected her to have been poisoned, as every sudden death in the sixteenth century was attributed to poison; and from a little village near Moscow he wrote a violent letter, accusing the Boyars both of poisoning his Anastasia and of misgoverning Russia during his minority. He concluded by threatening that God called him to abandon the ungrateful people, who were unworthy of such love as his.

This threw Russia into a panic. “How shall we get on without our ruler?” they asked. “Who will defend us against our enemies? What will the sheep do without their shepherd?”

Evidently Ivan was a politician of no mean order; he knew his Russia. Touched by the weeping of the herd, he returned to his subjects. But how changed an Ivan! Formerly he had been a splendid man physically, tall, broad-shouldered, with hawk nose and eagle eyes; a true tsar of the dynasty of Rurik; fit leader of the great Russian people. On his return to his loving people he was suddenly become thin and wasted; his hair was falling; his skin was dull; his eyes had lost their brilliance; physical degeneration had already set in.

Considering his subsequent history, it is probable that in the fit of petulance after the death of his beloved wife he had become infected with syphilis, which was then at the height of its conquering career throughout Europe. Eight days after her death he married a Circassian woman, who was of a rough mind, and of coarse breed; possibly it may have been from her that he caught his disease, for to her influence is generally attributed his mental degeneration.

Such a fate often happens to a physically strong young man who suddenly finds himself deprived of his helpmate; and it was a wise law of the Romans, that every Governor of a province must be married; if for no other reason than that a wife would protect him from the attacks of other women who might mean him less well than she.

When he was seventeen, he had proclaimed himself “Tsar,” thus showing himself bolder than his predecessors, who had perforce to content themselves with the title of “Grand-Duke.”

Now, in his new-found glory, with his new wife by his side, he raised for himself a bodyguard of 6,000 men, whom he called the Opritschnitza. These men rode through the countryside with besoms and dogs’ skulls at their saddle-bows. The emblems were supposed to signify that they would sweep away and hunt down all enemies of the Tsar.

But the Boyars were still to be properly punished for their wickedness; there were a few left, and at least the children of the infamous brood survived and had to be brought to justice; so Ivan rode through the land from country-house to country-house at the head of his men, besoms, dogs’ skulls, and all, slaying and burning; a right merry journey. Those whom he could not kill perished in the snow, and all Russia lay in terror of Æsop’s “King Stork.” Better had it been for Russia if the people had left him in his self-imposed quarantine, to recover in peace from his skin-syphilis before it had attacked his brain. For a man suddenly driven mad by securing absolute power, and worried by fighting, revenge, and murder, to rage desperately about the country instead of treating his syphilis even by the crude methods that were in vogue in the middle of the sixteenth century, was sheer madness. To this day we find that physical and mental rest, fresh air, and mercury, are the standbys in the treatment of syphilis, and quite probably it is less deadly to-day than it was in 1550.

It was the custom in Russia for the Tsar, when he wanted a wife, to collect all the most beautiful women from whom he should make his choice; and in 1570 he, in need of another wife, collected no less than 2,000 girls; them he kept in captivity for more than a year, treating them as he would, ruthlessly and relentlessly, a symptom truly characteristic of cerebral syphilis in a man untroubled by restraints, moral or legal. From these he chose another wife for himself and one for his son, that the great name of Ivan should not perish from the earth.

The shuddering remainder he bestowed on his courtiers, or sent home.

Cerebral syphilis is an extraordinary thing. Besides causing general paralysis, which is known positively to be syphilitic, the disease acts upon the arteries of the brain, and the symptoms that it causes seem to depend upon the areas of the brain that the diseased arteries supply. If the affected area is the front of the brain in which the intellectual faculties are supposed to be, all the symptoms of violent mental irritation are caused. They may begin quite early in the disease, and may last for many years till the patient’s death; much appears to depend upon whether the patient has been able to live a decent and quiet life. That in the case of Henry VIII his disease apparently led to nothing more monstrous than cutting off two of his wives’ heads—possibly they deserved it—and to violent and murderous political activity, would rather seem to show that if he had had a chance of rest and treatment he might have been no worse a king than many others who have won fame and gratitude. At least he was a highly educated man who certainly meant well at first. Ivan from the beginning was little better than a brute, of shocking family history and evil impulses. In him it probably went far beyond the stage of mere syphilitic psychasthenia.[10]

Seven wives in all were his, so that he beat Henry’s record by one. I suppose he showed the same miserable story of domestic unhappiness, but I have not been sufficiently interested to find out. Some of his letters are still extant, and they show all the signs of insanity, in their unwieldy length, their foolish cunning, their voluble avoidance of the main point, and their inconsequence. On the evidence of these letters alone any two doctors to-day would “sign up” Ivan IV. To say that he became wildly sexual would be to understate the matter: he developed the morals of a satyr. This is all very characteristic of syphilitic insanity, whose victims often find its worst effects in an utter abandonment of sexual restraint. It is almost as if the disease, being often the result of impurity, revenges itself on the victim by accentuating the very incontinence which has caused it.

The rest of the story of Ivan the Terrible—it is strange that history has not yet called him Ivan the Great—is not very interesting, except for two shocking incidents that we shall relate in their turn. It is simply the record of a man with an Oriental mind, maddened by syphilis, abandoning himself to the most ruthless cruelty, experimenting as if to plumb the depths of human wickedness. It would be wearisome both to tell it and to read it, with all the senseless stabbings, the stamping on the feet of helpless menials, the red-hot pokers, the experiments in torture, the burnings, the infamy. Let us hold our noses and turn to historical facts of a broader interest.

A man, in order to curry favour with the Tsar, wrote a private letter to the King of Poland accusing the great city of Novgorod of conspiring against its ruler. Ivan found it by a trick, possibly with the connivance of the writer. He held his peace, just as Henry VIII had remained silent when he first heard of the sin of Anne Boleyn. But, without a word to anybody, he collected an army of 15,000 men, whom he marched towards the doomed city, around which he erected a barricade of stakes that no one might enter or leave so as to escape the just punishment of an outraged Tsar. Then, for every day throughout a period of five weeks 500 to 1,000 of the citizens were led into his presence and put to death in all sorts of amusing ways; Ivan’s cleverness in devising new ways of killing seems to have been really wonderful. So wicked was the city that neither man, woman, nor child was spared, until but a scanty few remained alive. This niggardly remainder he collected before him, and forced to pray for the beloved Tsar. Like many syphilitic lunatics he had long considered himself to be God.

Then his eldest son, Ivan, who had grown up very like himself in character, so that people were already looking into the future with forebodings, took offence at what the half-witted fellow thought to be his father’s insult to his wife, Helena. With a roar Ivan rushed upon his son, striking him on the head with a heavy staff shod with iron. Ivan the prince dropped insensible, and died in a few days. Tsar Ivan was shocked unutterably, did penance and for a time seemed to regain sanity in his grief for the loss of his bright boy. But only for a time; soon the old monotonous régime of insensate cruelty returned.

1584 was a great year for Ivan. Feeling rather unwell the brilliant idea struck him that a well-born English girl would just suit his whim; so he sent a special messenger to Queen Elizabeth to select him one, also to inform her that, should his mutinous subjects prove unruly he would honour England by seeking therein a sanctuary. Thrice happy England; sanctuary for so many politicians! Well might refugees from the Austrian troubles in 1848 seek her green fields for peace.

The Virgin Queen selected one of her maids of honour, Lady Mary Hastings, for this dishonour. The Earl of Huntingdon, Lady Mary’s father, and Lady Mary herself, shuddered and protested at the thought of her marriage with this dreadful man, especially as Ivan’s seventh wife was still alive, and he had blithely proposed to set her aside in favour of the fair English maid, as the wretched creature would not die, nor leave him single, nor allow him to poison her. But for once, at least, Elizabeth’s heart conquered her head, and she did not press the match; it was too tragic even for the sixteenth century, so that no English girl graced Moscow any more than did Caliban marry Miranda.

But Death was still waiting, inexorably. No doubt Ivan had long forgotten the apparently trifling illness from which he had suffered after the death of his first wife, or rather soon after his second marriage, but it had not forgotten him. Nature never forgets and seldom forgives, as so many doctors have said about Life.

A frightful portent, a comet, appeared in the sky, and as Ivan saw its horrid tail the thought struck him that it had come to warn him of his death. All Russia was at once in a ferment. Soothsayers were summoned from all the ends of the Tsardom. No less than sixty were collected to save the life of the Tsar, that religious lunatic, who had thought himself to be God; but the best they could do was to promise him that he would not die until twelve days had elapsed. “It will be the worse for you if your promise holds good,” said Ivan in a fury; and with that he made up his mind to slay the soothsayers if he should survive the twelve days. The wife of his surviving son, who was to succeed him as the half-imbecile Tsar Feodor—syphilis again!—came to comfort him in his terrors, that this mighty Tsar should not have to go down into the dark his hand unpressed by any woman’s; but Ivan indecently assaulted her and she fled in terror. To the later Ivan every woman was less feminine than female.

The twelfth day dawned and Ivan prepared the scaffold for the execution of the soothsayers. He himself took what precautions occurred to his simple soul, and spent most of the day on a sofa playing draughts with one of his male favourites—surely the most harmless and safest of joys; surely Ivan could have done nothing better unless he had forestalled fate by a good course of mercury thirty years before! At last, just as Ivan was beginning to congratulate himself that he had beaten fate, beaten the comet and beaten the astrologers, and was glutting himself with the anticipation of his next merry jest, he suddenly choked, uttered a stifled cry and fell back dead. Fate and syphilis had won; the astrologers had predicted so accurately that their heads were even then trembling on their shoulders. What had happened? No doubt his syphilis had affected the aortic valve of his heart, as it frequently does to-day. The blood, instead of coursing on its orderly way throughout his body, had run back into his heart, which, being overfull of blood, had stopped; and in a moment Ivan the Terrible was dead. The people wept for him, as being the Tsar. “Such was the Tsar,” sobbed an admirer. “Such as he was, God made him.”

I do not ask you to suppose that I have diagnosed Ivan from any special knowledge of my own; the facts I have enumerated are all to be found in a book called The Blot upon the Brain, by the late Dr. W. W. Ireland, a once-celebrated alienist of Edinburgh, who, so far as I know, was the first to suggest that Ivan IV probably suffered from syphilis. I go further, and suggest that he probably suffered from diffuse cerebral syphilis and syphilis of the aortic valve, just as people do to this day.

Twenty years ago I read that syphilis was unusually widespread in Russia, and I have often wondered since 1917 whether that long ago epidemic can possibly have had anything to do with recent Russian politics.

Luther’s Devil

Those people who find it difficult to suppose that God so loves man that He occasionally suspends the operation of the principle of the conservation of energy in order that He may interfere in purely human affairs on this tiny planet will also find it difficult to believe in a personal devil who roams the world seeking whom he may devour and haunting people. Yet Martin Luther, who started the movement that ultimately led the world back to science and reason, had no difficulty whatever in believing this nonsense, and an infinity of other nonsense that to us nowadays seems little short of stark staring crazydom. Surely the poor gentleman must have been deranged, one thinks. Not at all, for Luther had the evidence of his own senses that he was haunted. He heard the foul fiend whistle and roar in his ears; the devil so gripped his heart that Luther never knew that the next moment might not be his last; sometimes he would cause him to be so giddy that when quietly sitting at work Luther was forced to fall from his stool. What was the matter with Martin Luther?

To begin with, most assuredly he was never mad; at the most one could fairly say that, like most of the great leaders of thought, Luther was probably of the manic-depressive temperament, with that strange mixture of apparently insane egotism and gloomy pessimism that so marks people of that temperament. In his famous prayer he orders his God about in a way that one can only compare to that of the Presbyterian divine who cried in a moment of irritation, “Noo, Lord, that’s fair ridic’lous.” If you read Luther’s Table-talk, you will at once be struck with his curious temperament, which could combine a certain amount of shrewd common sense, such as you would expect from a man of Saxon peasant stock, with profound belief in the supernatural, a good deal of disbelief in his fellow-man, virulent hatred of the Pope and all his works, and a good deal of what looks uncommonly like sheer mysticism. En passant I found therein the solution of a problem that has long puzzled me. What was the mysterious “sin against the Holy Ghost” that nobody seems to understand? Let Luther explain it to us himself. Many persons have imagined that it represented one of those sexual perversions against which primitive races have so often launched a fierce tabu, simply because they knew nothing of sexual pathology. But really, according to Luther, it was nothing of the kind.

“Sins against the Holy Ghost are: first, presumption; second, despair; third, opposition to and condemnation of the known truth; fourth, not to wish well but to grudge one’s brother and neighbour the grace of God; fifth, to be hardened; sixth, to be impenitent.”

The only fault one has to find with this is that Luther does not tell us how to recognise the truth when one sees it. What is the criterion of truth? Otherwise it would seem to be a fairly good description of a certain type of neurasthenia. Many neurasthenics must go in mortal sin every day of their lives, for it is well known that the devil is particularly on the lookout for sins against the Holy Ghost.

Probably Luther’s devil merely represented symptoms due to his wretched health. There is an excellent description of his dystrophy in Hartmann and Grisar’s monumental Life of Luther, and Dr. Cabanes went over it again from the point of view of modern medicine; while nearly fifty years ago Dr. W. W. Ireland of Edinburgh reviewed it from the point of view of an alienist of that time. But Ireland did not perceive the immense influence of Luther’s physical ailments on his mental condition. How could you expect him to, fifty years ago? From these three sources, therefore, I draw the material for this essay. A précis of Dr. Cabanes’ essay appeared in the St. Louis Urologic and Cutaneous Review for November, 1924.

Those fanatic Protestants who still believe that Luther was a meek and mild sort of monk who was driven to revolt by the sins of the “Whore of Babylon” should read his Table-talk in order that they may learn what manner of man he really was; and it will be surprising if they rise from it without an insight into Luther’s character that may possibly change their whole conception of the Reformation. Far from being a gentle and Christlike son of the Church, he was, so far as I can gather from his own words, perhaps the most frenzied theologian of that dark century of theologians. In sheer outrageous superstition he could outdistance even the most ignorant peasant; his fear of the devil amounted to possession, because he attributed to the action of the foul fiend every single thing that he could not understand. An hour spent in reading Luther’s Table-talk gives a better insight into the mind of man during that most terrible of all centuries than a year spent in reading an ordinary history. The most reasonable excuse that we can make for him is that he was ill during the greater part of his life, suffering from one of the most distressing of all ailments.

From about the age of thirty he suffered from dreadful noises in the head, banging, whistling, thumping, and crashing. These were accompanied by terrible attacks of giddiness, which sometimes actually caused him to fall from his stool, and rendered work impossible. Towards middle life he became so neurasthenic that his mental condition became almost that of a lunatic—and indeed the Catholics did not miss the opportunity to say that he had actually become mad; but probably this was but a tit for Luther’s own tat of extraordinary theological violence, and was certainly never true. But what is true is that he began to suffer from pains in the region of the heart, accompanied by a sense of dreadful oppression, so that sometimes he thought himself to be dying. As he grew older he became very deaf, and his cardiac distress became still more terrible.

All these things were to Luther certain evidence that his personal devil was attacking him; it is said that once he threw a pot of ink at the fiend, and the marks of it are still shown. All these things can be explained easily—as Dr. Cabanes suggested—if we suppose that Luther was suffering from Ménière’s disease of the labyrinth, a disease of the inner ear that occasionally attacks middle-aged and gouty people, and is supposed to have added its tragedy to Dean Swift’s already tragic life. The labyrinth is composed of the semi-circular canals, structures which are directed longitudinally and laterally to the axis of the body, and assist us in maintaining our equilibrium; if anything goes wrong in these tiny tubes an unconquerable feeling of giddiness overwhelms us, and it is thought that it is the washing this way and that of the fluid in these canals that causes the deathly feeling of giddiness in seasickness. And the fact that Luther’s deafness steadily increased as he grew older seems to show that it was really caused by Ménière’s disease. In 1541 he seems to have suffered from middle-ear disease, accompanied by dreadful earaches and discharge from the ear; while this lasted he became temporarily quite deaf, but all the time the labyrinthine disorder was going on.

Although he never seems actually to have suffered from gout, there seems to be no doubt that he was of the gouty diathesis, and that uric acid was constantly circulating in his blood, which, added to his manic-depressive temperament, would undoubtedly increase his tendency to gloom. If there can be any worse devil than frightful noises in the head, neurasthenia and uric acid in the blood, it would be interesting to learn what it is. Many a man has been driven to suicide by nothing worse. That Luther seems to have resisted any temptation to suicide that he may have had, speaks volumes for the strength of his purpose.

Probably the pains in his heart and accompanying fear of death represented a gigantic rise in his blood-pressure that would naturally occur in a man of such furious polemic zeal. And it may be that it possibly went so far as to cause angina pectoris. The accompanying fear of death certainly looks like angina, for there is no disease more frightful than angina; the patient feels as though the very grave were yawning for him.

Luther seems to have ultimately become on almost friendly terms with his devil. One night at the castle of Wartburg he heard a dreadful noise on the stair which woke him up—probably it represented noises in his own ears. He got out of bed in a rage with the insolent fiend.

“Is that thou, devil?” he shouted, but Satan said not a word. Then Luther, seeing that Auld Hornie was not to be drawn, got back into bed, piously commended himself to the care of the Lord Jesus Christ, and ultimately got off to sleep again. And this is the sort of thing that went on day and night with the Reformer. What a difference a course of salicylates and bromides might have made to Luther, and possibly through him to the whole Reformation, for there can be little doubt that Luther’s devil played a great part in spurring him to yet more furious religious zeal. Sometimes even he began to despair, and admitted that it was impossible to make peace with the Pope so long as the papacy was the papacy and Luther was Luther. Viewed in this light, that in a sense he was Athanasius contra mundum, Luther’s dictatorial and egotistical prayer to his God becomes almost pathetic, for he felt himself alone on the side of God against the mighty power whom he frankly calls anti-Christ, with hardly a soul helping him; it may have been during those passionate appeals to God for guidance before he made the break that his blood-pressure began to rise, for nothing causes the blood-pressure to rise like passionate emotion of any kind. Perhaps forty years later it killed him. Rising blood-pressure kills with exceeding slowness; let excitable politicians beware, for the same rules apply to them to-day as applied to poor Martin Luther, who was really less a man of God than a most furious politician.

Both Hartmann and Grisar and Dr. Cabanes give substantially the same accounts of his sudden death; so probably it is assured in spite of the Catholic story that he committed suicide. For two years a stone in the bladder had added to the tortures of his Ménière’s disease, and on February 17th, 1546, his last seizure attacked him. While at Eisleben he became very restless. “Here at this little village I was baptised,” he said. “It may be that I shall remain here.” In the evening he felt that oppression in the chest of which he had so often complained, so he got his attendants to rub him down with hot flannels, and as soon as he felt better sat down to a light supper. In the middle of the night he awoke, feeling deadly ill. “O my God,” he said, “I do feel so ill; I feel as though I were dying,” and complained of a terrible oppression in his chest. His doctors found him bathed in a cold sweat and without perceptible pulse. He murmured his favourite text from St. John, “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have life everlasting.” Then he became unconscious and his friends shouted into his deaf ears the question whether he remained steadfast in his faith in Christ and his doctrine, to which they thought they heard him say “Yes,” though probably he did not hear them. At three in the morning his breathing suddenly became audible, and after a deep sigh he died. Probably this is a true account, for we often see the breathing of a dying man assume the up and down character that we call “Cheyne-Stokes.”

For some extraordinary reason Messrs. Hartmann and Grisar attributed this obvious death from heart-failure to apoplexy. One can only suppose that they had never seen a man die of apoplexy; and Dr. Cabanes is undoubtedly right when he attributes it to heart-defeat after a long period of high blood-pressure. Probably a certain amount of angina pectoris also entered into the picture, which is much the same thing put into other language.

But it may be that Dr. Cabanes was too materialistic in supposing that the cause of Luther’s high blood-pressure was drink, in spite of Melanchthon’s explicit statement that Luther was only a moderate drinker. Probably he was no worse than other Germans of the time; and it seems to be undoubtedly true that intense emotion can permanently so put up the blood-pressure that the patient ultimately dies even if only after a great many years; and surely no man ever strained his vascular system more terribly than Martin Luther.

Luther was not a nice man; but nice men do not revolutionise the world.

Henry Fielding

In the gloomy procession of drink, gluttony, and syphilis which makes up so large a part of history—always excepting for a moment Joan of Arc, that “one white angel of war” whom the English and French burned because she did not and could not ever become mature, as I have shown in Post Mortem—there is at least one very great man whom one can only pity, if my ideas about him are correct, without the faintest trace of censure—the author of that “foul, coarse and abominable” book, Tom Jones, which has been such a nightmare to the prude and yet shows human nature better than most of the books which are welcomed in country parsonages.