THE DOCTOR.

HENRY VIII. RECEIVING THE BARBER-SURGEONS.

THE DOCTOR
IN
HISTORY, LITERATURE, FOLK-LORE,
ETC.

EDITED BY
WILLIAM ANDREWS, F.R.H.S.,
Author of “Bygone England,”
“Old Church Lore,” etc.

HULL:
WILLIAM ANDREWS & CO., THE HULL PRESS.
LONDON:
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, & CO., LTD.
1896.

Preface.

In the following pages I have attempted to bring together from the pens of several authors who have written expressly for this book, the more interesting phases of the history, literature, folk-lore, etc., of the medical profession.

If the same welcome be given to this work as was accorded to those I have previously produced, my labours will not have been in vain.

William Andrews.

The Hull Press,
Hull, November 11th, 1895.

Contents.

THE DOCTOR
IN HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND FOLK-LORE.

Barber-Surgeons.

By William Andrews, f.r.h.s.

The calling of the barber is of great antiquity. We find in the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (v. 1) allusions to the Jewish custom of the barber shaving the head as a sign of mourning.

In the remote past the art of surgery and the trade of barber were combined. It is clear that in all parts of the civilized world, in bygone times, the barber acted as a kind of surgeon, or to state his position more precisely, he practised phlebotomy.

Barbers appear to have gained their experience from the monks whom they assisted in surgical operations. The clergy up to about the twelfth century had the care of men’s bodies as well as of their souls, and practised surgery and medicine. The operations of surgery involved the shedding of blood, and it was felt that this was incompatible with the functions of the clergy. After much consideration and discussion, in 1163 the council of Tours, under Pope Alexander III., forbade the clergy to act as surgeons, but they were permitted to dispense medicine.

The edict of Tours must have given satisfaction to the barbers, and they were not slow to avail themselves of the opportunities the change afforded them. In London, and we presume in other places, the barbers advertised their blood-letting in a most objectionable manner. It was customary to put blood in their windows to attract the attention of the public. An ordinance was passed in 1307, directing the barbers to have the blood “privily carried into the Thames under pain of paying two shillings to the use of the Sheriffs.”

At an early period in London the barbers were banded together, and a gild was formed. In the first instance it seems that the chief object was the bringing together of the members at religious observances. They attended the funerals and obits of deceased members and their wives. Eventually it was transformed into a semi-social and religious gild, and subsequently became a trade gild.

In 1308, Richard le Barber, the first master of the Barbers’ Company, was sworn at the Guildhall, London. As time progressed, the London Company of Barbers increased in importance.

In the first year of the reign of Edward IV. (1462) the barbers were incorporated by a royal charter, and it was confirmed by succeeding monarchs.

A change of title occurred in 1540, and it was then named the Company of Barber-Surgeons. Holbein painted a picture of Henry VIII. and the Barber-Surgeons. The painting is still preserved, and may be seen at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, Monkwell Street, London. We give a carefully executed wood engraving of the celebrated picture. Pepys calls this “not a pleasant though a good picture.” It is the largest and last painting of Holbein. In the Leisure Hour for September 1895, are some interesting details respecting it, that are well worth reproducing. “It is painted,” we are told, “on vertical oak boards, being 5ft. 11in. high by 10ft. 2in. long. It seems to have been begun about 1541, and finished after Holbein’s death in 1543, and it has evidently been altered since its first delivery. The tablet, for instance, was not always in the background, for the old engraving in the College of Surgeons has a window in its place, showing the old tower of St. Bride’s, and thus indicating Bridewell as the site of the ceremony. The outermost figure to the left, too, is omitted, and, according to some critics, the back row of heads are all post-Holbeinic. The names over the heads appear to have been added in Charles I.’s time, and it is significant that only two portraits in the back row are so distinguished.” The king is represented wearing his robes, and is seated on a chair of state, holding erect his sword of state, and about him are the leading members of the fraternity. “The men whose portraits appear in the picture,” says the Leisure Hour, “are not nonentities. The first figure to the king’s right, with his hands in his gown, is Dr. John Chambre, king’s physician, Fellow and Warden of Merton, and happy in his multitudinous appointments, both clerical and lay. Behind him is the Doctor Butts of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VIII.’—the Sir William Butts who was the king’s and Princess Mary’s physician, and whose wife is known by Holbein’s splendid portrait of her. Behind Butts is Alsop, the king’s apothecary. To the king’s left the first figure is Thomas Vicary, surgeon to Bartholomew’s Hospital, serjeant-surgeon to the king, and author of ‘The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man.’ Next to him is Sir John Ayleff, an exceptionally good portrait. Then come in the undernamed: Nicholas Simpson, Edmund Harman (one of the witnesses to the king’s will), James Monforde (who gave the company the silver hammer still used by the Master in presiding at the courts), John Pen (another fine portrait), Nicholas Alcocke, and Richard Ferris (also serjeant-surgeon to the king). In the back row the only names given are those of Christopher Salmond and William Tilley.”

In the reign of Henry VIII. an enactment as follows was in force:—“No person using any shaving or barbery in London shall occupy any surgery, letting of blood, or other matter, except of drawing teeth.” Laws were made, but they could not be, or at all events were not, enforced. Disputes were frequent. The barbers acted often as surgeons, and the surgeons increased their income by the use of the razor and shears. At this period vigorous attempts were made to confine each to their legitimate work.

The barber’s pole, it is said, owes its origin to the barber-surgeons. Much has been written on this topic, but we believe that the following are the facts of the matter. We know that in the days of old bleeding was a frequent occurrence, and during the operation the patient used to grasp a staff, stick, or pole which the barber-surgeon kept ready for use, and round it was bound a supply of bandages for tying the arm of the patient. The pole, when not in use, was hung at the door as a sign. In course of time a painted pole was displayed instead of that used in the operation.

Lord Thurlow addressing the House of Lords, July 17th, 1797, stated, “by a statute, still in force, barbers and surgeons were each to use a pole [as a sign]. The barbers were to have theirs blue and white, striped, with no other appendage; but the surgeons’, which was to be the same in other respects, was likewise to have a gully-pot and a red rag, to denote the particular nature of their vocations.”

The Rev. J. L. Saywell has a note on bleeding in his “History and Annals of Northallerton” (1885):—“Towards the early part of this century,” observes Mr. Saywell, “a singular custom prevailed in the town and neighbourhood of Northallerton (Yorkshire). In the spring of the year nearly all the robust male adults, and occasionally females, repaired to a surgeon to be bled, a process which they considered essentially conduced to vigorous health.” The charge for the operation was one shilling.

Parliament was petitioned, in 1542, praying that surgeons might be exempt from bearing arms and serving on juries, and thus be enabled without hindrance to attend to their professional duties. The request was granted, and to the present time medical men enjoy the privileges granted so long ago.

In 1745, the surgeons and the barbers separated by Act of Parliament. The barber-surgeons lingered for a long time, the last in London, named Middleditch, of Great Suffolk Street, in the Borough, only dying in 1821. Mr. John Timbs, the popular writer, left on record that he had a vivid recollection of Middleditch’s dentistry.

Touching for the King’s Evil.

By William Andrews, f.r.h.s.

The practice of touching for the cure of scrofula—a disease more generally known as king’s evil—prevailed for a long period in England. Edward the Confessor who reigned from 1042 to 1066, appears to be the first monarch in this country who employed this singular mode of treatment.

About a century after the death of Edward the Confessor, William of Malmesbury compiled his “Chronicle of the Kings of England,” and in this work is the earliest allusion to the subject. Holinshed has placed on record some interesting details respecting Edward the Confessor. “As it has been thought,” says Holinshed, in writing of the king, “he was inspired with the gift of prophecy, and also to have the gift of healing infirmities and disease commonly called the king’s evil, and left that virtue, as it were, a portion of inheritance to his successors, the kings of this realm.” The first edition of the “Chronicle” was published in 1577, and from it Shakespeare drew much material for his historical dramas. There is an allusion to this singular superstition in Macbeth, which it will be interesting to reproduce.

Malcolm and Macduff are in England, “in a room in the King’s palace” (the palace of King Edward the Confessor):—

History does not furnish any facts respecting touching by the four kings of the House of Normandy. It is generally believed that the Norman monarchs did not practise the rite.

Henry II., the first of the Plantagenet line, emulated the Confessor. We know this fact from a record made by Peter of Blois, the royal chaplain, in which it is clearly stated that the king performed certain cures by touch. John of Gaddesden, in the days of Edward II., wrote a treatise in which he gave instructions for several modes of treatment for the disease, and if they failed, recommended the sufferers to seek cure by royal touch. Bradwardine, Archbishop of Canterbury, lived in the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II., and from his statements we learn that both kings kept up the observance.

Henry IV., the first king of the House of Lancaster, touched for the evil. This we learn from a “Defence to the title of House of Lancaster,” written by Sir John Fortesque, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench. He speaks of the practice as “belonging to the kings of England from time immemorial.” This pamphlet is preserved among the Cottonian manuscripts in the British Museum.

The earliest king of the House of Tudor, Henry VII., was the first to give a small gold piece, known as a touch-piece, to those undergoing the ceremony.

During the reign of the next monarch, Henry VIII., little attention appears to have been given to the subject. It was at this period largely practised in France. Cardinal Wolsey, when at the Court of Francis I., in 1527, witnessed the king touch two hundred people. On Easter Sunday, 1686, Louis XIV. is recorded to have touched 1,600. He used these words:—“Le Roy te touche, Dieu te guéisse.” (“The King touches thee. May God cure thee!”)

Coming back to the history of our own country, and dealing with the more interesting passages bearing on this theme, we find that in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, William Clowes, the Court Surgeon, believed firmly in the efficacy of the royal touch. “The king’s queen’s evil,” he says, “is a disease repugnant to nature, which grievous malady is known to be miraculously cured and healed by the sacred hands of the Queen’s most Royal Majesty, even by Divine inspiration and wonderful work and power of God, above man’s will, act, and expectation.” In this reign, under the title of “Charisma; sive Donum Sanationis,” a book was published by William Fookes bearing testimony to the cures effected by royal touch on all sorts and conditions of people from various parts of the country.

The Stuarts paid particular attention to the practice. No fewer than eleven proclamations published during the reign of Charles I. are preserved at the State Paper Office, and chiefly relate to the times the afflicted might attend the court to receive the royal touch. In course of time the king’s pecuniary means became limited, and he was unable to present gold touch-pieces, so silver was substituted, and many received the rite of touch only.

During the Commonwealth we have not any trace of Cromwell touching for the malady. During the rising in the West of England, the Duke of Monmouth, who claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne, touched several persons for the evil, and, said a newspaper of the time, with success. One of the charges made against him on his trial at Edinburgh for high treason, was, that he had “touched children of the King’s Evil.” Two witnesses proved the charge, having witnessed the ceremony at Taunton.

No sooner had another Stuart obtained the English crown than the ceremony was again performed. During the first year of the reign of Charles II., six thousand seven hundred and twenty-five persons were brought to His Majesty to be healed. The ceremony was often performed on a Sunday. Evelyn and Pepys were witnesses of these proceedings, and in their Diaries have recorded interesting particulars. Under date of 6th July, 1660, “His Majesty,” writes Evelyn, “began first to touch for ye evil, according to custome thus: Sitting under his state in the Banqueting House, the chirurgeons cause the sick to be brought or led up to the throne, where, they kneeling, ye king strokes their faces and cheeks with both his hands at once, at which instant a chaplaine in his fermalities says:—‘He put his hands upon them and healed them.’ This he said to every one in particular. When they have been all totched, they come up again in the same order; and the other chaplaine kneeling, and having an angel of gold strung on white ribbon on his arme, delivers them one by one to His Majestie, who puts them about the necks of the touched as they passe, while the first chaplaine repeats ‘That is ye true light which came into ye world.’ Then follows an epistle (as at first a gospel) with the liturgy, prayers for the sick, with some alteration, and then the Lord Chamberlain and the Comptroller of the Household bring a basin, ewer, and towel, for his Majesty to wash.”

Samuel Pepys witnessed the ceremony on April 13th, 1661, and refers to it in his Diary. “Went to the Banquet House, and there saw the King heal, the first time I ever saw him do it, which he did with great gravity, and it seemed to me to be an ugly office and a simple one.”

In Evelyn’s Diary on March 28th, 1684, there is a record of a serious accident, “There was,” he writes, “so great a concourse of people with their children to be touched for the evil, that six or seven were crushed to death by pressing at the chirurgeon’s door for tickets.”

According to Macaulay, Charles II. during his reign touched nearly a hundred thousand persons. In the year 1682 he performed the rite eight thousand five hundred times.

No person was allowed to enter the King’s presence for the purpose of receiving the rite without first obtaining a certificate from the minister of his parish from whence he came, nor unless he had not previously been touched. A proclamation of Charles II., dated January 9th, 1683, ordered a register of the certificates to be made. Here is a record drawn from the Old Town’s Book of Birmingham:—

“March 14th, 1683, Elizabeth, daughter of John and Anne Dickens, of Birmingham, in the county of Warwick, was certified for in order to obtayne his Majesty’s touch for her cure.

We cull from the churchwardens’ accounts of Terling, Essex, the following item:—

“1683 Dec^r. Pd. for his Majestie’s order for touching 00.00.06.”

A page in the register book of Bisley, Surrey, is headed thus, “Certificates for the Evill commonly called the kings Evill.” Two entries occur as follow:—

“Elizabeth Collier and Thomas Collier the children of Thomas Collier, Senior, had a certificate from the minister and churchwardens of Bisley, August 7th 1686.”

“Sarah Massey, the daughter of Richard Massey, had a certificate from the minister and churchwardens of Bisley, 1st April 1688.”

Old parish accounts often contain entries similar to the following, from Ecclesfield, Yorkshire:—

“The following extracts,” says a contributor to The Reliquary of January, 1894, “from the Minute Books of the Corporation of the city of York, show that general belief in the virtue of the touching by the King was unshaken at the end of the seventeenth century. It must be borne in mind that these Minutes do not record the acts of individuals, but were those of the Corporation of what was at that time one of the most important cities in the country, and that it was in administering Poor Law Relief that the grants were made.

In Vol. 38 of the Corporation Records, fo. 74b, under the date of February 28th, 1671, is the following:—

“Ordered that Elizabeth Trevis haue x^s given her for charges in carrying her daughter to London to be touched for the Evill.”

A few years later, on March 12th, 1678 (fo. 156b), occurs the following:—

“Anne Thornton to haue x^s for goeing to London to be touched for the euill.”

And again on March 3, 1687 (fo. 249b), ten shillings was granted for “carrying of Judith Gibbons & her Child & one Dorothy Browne to London to be touched by his Majestie in order to be healed of the Kings Evil.”

The Records of the Corporation of Preston, Lancashire, contain at least two references to this matter. In the year 1682 the bailiffs were instructed to “pay unto James Harrison, bricklayer, 10s. towards carrying his son to London, in order to the procuring of His Majesty’s touch.”

Five years later, when James II. was at Chester, the council passed a vote that “the Bailiff pay unto the persons undermentioned each of them 5s. towards their charge in going to Chester to get his Majesty’s touch:—Anne, daughter of Abel Mope; —— daughter Richard Letmore.”

It is recorded that James II. touched eight hundred persons in the choir of the Cathedral of Chester.

The ceremony cost, we learn from Macaulay, about £10,000 a year, and the amount would have been much greater but for the vigilance of the royal surgeons, whose business it was to examine the applicants, and to distinguish those who came for the cure, and those who came for the gold.

William III. declined to have anything to do with a ceremony he regarded as an imposture. “It is a silly superstition,” he said, when he heard that at the close of Lent his palace was besieged by a crowd of sick. “Give the poor creatures some money, and send them away.” On one occasion only was he induced to lay his hand on a sufferer. “God give you better health,” he said, “and more sense.”

The next to wear the crown was Queen Anne, and she revived the rite. In the London Gazette of March 12th, 1712, appeared an official announcement that the queen intended to touch for the evil. In Lent of that year, Dr. Johnson, then a child, went up to London with his mother in the stage coach that he might have the benefit of the royal touch. He was then between two and three years of age. “His mother,” writes Boswell, “yielding to the superstitious notion which, it is wonderful to think, prevailed so long in this country as to the virtue of regal touch (a notion to which a man of such inquiry and such judgment as Carte, the historian, could give credit), carried him to London, where he was actually touched by Queen Anne. Mrs. Johnson, indeed, as Mr. Hector informed me, acted by the advice of the celebrated Sir John Floyer, then a physician in Lichfield. Johnson used to talk of this very frankly, and Mrs. Piozzi has preserved his very picturesque description of the scene as it remained upon his fancy. Being asked if he could remember Queen Anne, ‘He had,’ he said, ‘a confused but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood.’ This touch, however, was without any effect.” The malady remained with Dr. Johnson to his death.

TOUCH-PIECE OF CHARLES II. (GOLD).

After the death of Queen Anne, no other English sovereign kept up the custom, although the service remained in the “Book of Common Prayer” as late as 1719.

The latest instance we have found of the ceremony being performed was in October, 1745, when Charles Edward, at Holyrood House, touched a child.

(GOLD). TOUCH-PIECES OF JAMES II. (SILVER).

In the preceding pages we have referred to “touch pieces,” and it will not be without interest to direct attention to some of the more notable examples. A small sum of money was given by Edward I., and it has been suggested that it was probably presented in the form of alms. Henry VII. gave a small gold coin known as the angel noble. It was of about six shillings and eight pence in value, and was a current coin of the period, and the smallest gold coin issued. On one side of the coin was a figure of the angel Michael overcoming the dragon, and on the other a ship on the waves. During the residence of Charles II. on the continent, those who visited him to receive the royal rite had to give him gold, but after the Restoration, “touch-pieces” were made expressly for presentation at the healings. They were small gold medals resembling angels, but they were not equal in value to the angels previously given. However they met a want when gold was in great demand. James II. had two kinds of touch pieces, one of gold and the other of silver, but they were not half the size of those given by Charles II. Queen Anne gave a touch-piece a little larger than that of James II. The touch-piece presented by this Queen to Dr. Johnson may, with other specimens, be seen in the British Museum.

TOUCH-PIECE OF ANNE (GOLD).

In a carefully-compiled article in the Archæological Journal, vol. x., p. 187-211, will be found some interesting particulars of touch-pieces, and to it we are indebted for the few details we have given bearing on this part of our subject.

Visiting Patients.

The doctor made his daily rounds, before the reign of Charles II., on horseback, sitting sideways on foot-clothes. He must have cut an undignified figure as he rode through the streets of London and our chief towns.

A change came after the Restoration, and we meet with the physicians making their visits in a carriage and pair. It seems that increased fees were expected with the introduction of the carriage. A curious note appears on this subject in Lex Talionis. “For there must now be a little coach and two horses,” says the author, “and, being thus attended, half-a-piece their usual fee is but ill taken, and popped into their left pocket, and possibly may cause the patient to send for his worship twice before he will come again in the hazard of another angel.” The carriage was popular, and physicians vied with each other in making the greatest display.

In the days of Queen Anne, a doctor would even drive half-a-dozen horses attached to his chariot, and not fewer than four was the general rule.

In our own time the doctor’s carriage and pair is to be seen in all directions. It is now driven for use and not for display as in the days of Queen Anne.

We have seen the bicycle used by doctors of good standing, and we predict the time is not far distant when it will be more generally ridden by members of the medical profession.

Assaying Meat and Drink.

By William Andrews, f.r.h.s.

From the time of our earliest Norman king down to the days of James I., the chief people of the land partook of their food in fear. Treachery was a not infrequent occurrence, and poison was much used as a means of taking life. As a precaution against murder, assayers of food, drink, etc., were appointed. Doctors usually filled the office, and by their unremitting attention to their duties crime was to a great extent prevented. In a royal household the physician acted as assayer.

Let us imagine ourselves in an old English home, the palace of a king, or the stronghold of a leading nobleman. The cloth is laid by subordinate servants, but not without considerable ceremony. Next a chief officer of the household sees that every article on the table is free from poison. The bread about to be consumed is cut, and, in the presence of the “taker of assay,” is tasted, and the salt is also tested. The knives, spoons, and table linen are kissed by a responsible person, so that assurance might be given that they were free from poison. Then the salt dish is covered with a lid, and the bread is wrapped in a napkin, and afterwards the whole table is covered with a fair white cloth. The coverlet remains until the head of the household comes to take his repast, and then his chief servant removes the covering of the table. If any person attempted to touch the covered bread or the covered salt after the spreading of the coverlet, they ran the risk of a severe flogging, and sometimes even death at the hands of a hangman.

The time of bringing up the meats having arrived, the assayer proceeds to the kitchen, and tests the loyalty of the steward and cook by compelling them to partake of small quantities of the food prepared before it is taken to the table. Pieces of bread were cut and dipped into every mess, and were afterwards eaten by cook and steward. The crusts of closed pies were raised, and the contents tasted; small pieces of the more substantial viands were tasted, and not a single article of food was suffered to leave the kitchen without being assayed. After the ceremony had been completed, each dish was covered, no matter if hot or cold, and these were taken by servitors to the banqueting hall, a marshal with wand of office preceding the procession. The bearers on no account were permitted to linger on the way, no matter if their hands were burnt they must bear the pain, far better to suffer that than be suspected of tampering with the food. On no pretext were the covers to be removed until the proper time, and by the servants appointed for that purpose. If very hot, the bearers might perhaps protect their hands with bread, which was to be kept out of sight.

We produce from the Rev. Charles Bullock’s interesting volume entitled “How they Lived in the Olden Time,” a picture of bringing in the dinner. It will be observed that the steward, bearing his staff of office, heads the procession.

Each dish as it was brought to the table was again tasted in the presence of the personage who purposed partaking of it. This entailed considerable ceremony, and took up much time. To render the delay as little unpleasant as possible to the guests, music was usually performed.

BRINGING IN THE DINNER.

In the stately homes of old England, as a mark of respect to the distinguished visitor, it was customary to assign to him an assayer. History furnishes a notable instance of an omission of the official. When Richard II. was at Pontefract Castle, we gather from Hall’s Chronicle, edition 1548, folio 14, that Sir Piers Exton intended poisoning the King, and, to use the chronicler’s words, forbade the “esquire whiche was accustumed to serve and take the assaye beefore Kyng Richarde, to again use that manner of service.” According to Hall, the King “sat downe to dyner, and was served withoute curtesie or assaye; he much mervaylyng at the sodayne mutacion of the thynge, demanded of the esquire why he did not do his duty.” He replied that Sir Piers had forbidden him performing the duties pertaining to his position. The King immediately picked up a carving-knife, struck upon the head of the assayer, and exclaimed, “The devil take Henry of Lancaster and thee together.”

Paul Hentzner, a German tutor, visited England in 1598, and wrote a graphic account of his travels in the country, which were translated into English by Horace Walpole. The work contains a curious account of the ceremonies of laying the cloth, etc., for Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich Palace. The notice is rather long, but is so entertaining and informing that it well merits reproduction. “A gentleman,” it is stated, “entered the room bearing a rod, and along with him another who had a table-cloth, which, after they had both kneeled three times, with the utmost veneration, he spread upon the table, and after kneeling again, they both retired. Then came two others, one with the rod again, and the other with a salt-cellar and a plate of bread: when they had kneeled, as the others had done, and placed what was brought upon the table, they, too, retired with the same ceremonies performed by the first. At last came an unmarried lady (we were told she was a Countess), and along with her a married one, bearing a tasting-knife; the former was dressed in white silk, who when she prostrated herself three times in the most graceful manner, approached the table, and rubbed the plates with bread and salt with as much care as if the Queen had been present; when they had waited there a little time, the Yeomen of the Guard entered bareheaded, clothed in scarlet, with a golden rose upon their backs, bringing in at each turn a course of twenty-four dishes, served in plate, most of it gilt; these dishes were received by a gentleman in the same order they were brought, and placed upon the table, while the lady-taster gave to each guard a mouthful to eat, for fear of poison. During the time that this guard, which consists of the tallest and stoutest men that can be found in all England, being carefully selected for this service, were bringing dinner, twelve trumpets and two kettle-drums made the hall ring for half-an-hour together. At the end of the ceremonial, a number of unmarried ladies appeared, who, with particular solemnity, lifted the meat off the table and conveyed it into the Queen’s inner and more private chamber, where, after she had chosen for herself, the rest goes to the ladies of the Court.”

ASSAYING WINE.

Drink as well as food had to be assayed twice, once in the buttery and again in the hall. The butler drank of the wine in the buttery, and then handed it to the cup-bearer in a covered vessel. When he arrived at the hall, he removed the lid of the cup, and poured into the inverted cover a little of the wine, and drank it under the eye of his master. We give an illustration, reproduced from an ancient manuscript, of an assayer tasting wine. The middle of the twelfth century is most probably the period represented.

In the ancient assay cup, it is related on reliable authority, a charm was attached to a chain of gold, or embedded in the bottom of the vessel. This was generally a valuable carbuncle or a piece of tusk of a narwhal, usually regarded as the horn of the unicorn, and which was believed to have the power of neutralising or even detecting the presence of poison.

Edward IV. presented to the ambassadors of Charles of Burgundy a costly assay cup of gold, ornamented with pearls and a great sapphire, and, to use the words of an old writer, “in the myddes of the cuppe ys a grete pece of a Vnicornes horne.”

The water used for washing the hands of the great had to be tasted by the yeoman who placed it on the table, to prove that no poison was contained in the fluid. This ceremony had to be performed in the presence of an assayer.

The Gold-headed Cane.

By Tom Robinson, m.d.

The stick takes many forms. It is the sceptre of kings, the club of a police constable, the baton of a field marshal. The mace is but a stick of office, being ornamental and merely symbolical.

In history we may go back to the pilgrim’s staff, which was four feet long, and hollow at the top to carry away relics from the Holy Land. It was also used to carry contraband goods, such as seeds, or silk-worms’ eggs, which the Chinese, Turks, or Greeks forbade to be exported. It is occasionally used for eluding the customs now. Some people smuggle diamonds into the United States in that way.

Prometheus’ reed, or marthex, in which he conveyed fire to “wretched mortals,” as Aeschylus tells us, is a well-known fable.

An enormous amount of interest centres around the walking stick, and there are few families in which we do not find an old stick handed down generation after generation. Such an inheritance was at one time a common possession of those who belonged to the medical profession.

DR. RADCLIFFE’S CANE.

The College of Physicians possesses at the present time the gold cane which Radcliffe, Mead, Askew, Pitcairn, and Baillie successively carried about with them, and which Mrs. Baillie presented to that learned body. The drawing here given is a representation of this cane, and it will be seen that it has not a gold knob, but consists of an engraved handle or crook. It is, I think, quite clear that the custom which the doctors of the last century always followed in carrying their stick about with them, even to the bed-side, was due entirely to the fact that the handle of the cane could be, and was, filled with strong smelling disinfectants, such as rosemary and camphor. The doctor held this against his nose obviously for two reasons. One, to destroy any poison which might be floating about in the air but chiefly to prevent him smelling unpleasant odours. This stick was as long as a footman’s, smooth and varnished.

A belief in the protective power of camphor and other pleasant-smelling herbs is still in existence, and we know quite a number of individuals who carry about with them bags of camphor during the prevalence of an epidemic.

Before Howard exposed the deadly sanitary state of the prisons of this country, it was the custom to sprinkle aromatic herbs before the prisoners, so powerful was the noxious effluvium which exhaled from their filthy bodies. The bouquet which the chaplain always carried when accompanying a prisoner to Tyburn, was used for the same defensive purpose.

The stick of the physician’s cane was probably a relic of the legerdemain of the healer, who in superstitious times worked upon the ignorance of the credulous. The modern conjuror always uses a wand in his entertainment. These baubles die hard, because there is a strong conservative instinct in the race which clings with tremendous tenacity to anything which has the sanction of antiquity.

The barber’s pole is still seen even in London, and is striped blue and white, emblems of the phlebotomist, and symbolical of the blue venous blood, which was so ungrudgingly given by the sufferers from almost all maladies. The white stripe represented the bandage used to bind up the wound on the arm.

The practice of the bleeders continued in fashion in England until the beginning of this century. John Coutsley Lettsom, who possessed high literary attainments, and who was President of the Philosophical Society of London, and who entertained at his house at Grove Hill, Camberwell, many of the most distinguished men of his time, including Boswell and Dr. Johnson, and whose writings shew he was an enlightened physician, was bold in his treatment of disease, and a heroic bleeder. He used to say of himself:—

“When patients sick to me apply,
I physics, bleeds, and sweats ’em
Then if they choose to die,
What’s that to me—I lets ’em.”

The wig also constituted an essential part of the dress of the older physicians. It was a three tailed one, and this with silk stockings, clothes well trimmed, velvet coat with stiff skirts, large cuffs and buckled shoes, made quite an imposing show, and when they rode in their gilt carriages with two running footmen, as was the custom, no one would be better recognised. It is interesting to contrast the dress and mode of practice of the modern physician with those who built up the honourable calling of medicine. It is so easy to laugh at those who practised the art of medicine before modern scientific investigation had laid naked so many of the secrets of physiology, pathology, and vital chemistry. Slowly but surely as the true nature and progress of disease has become known, so have all the adventitious and unnecessary surroundings of dress disappeared, and now we may meet the most eminent of our doctors, clad in the same garments as a man on Change. All this was inevitable, but running through the whole history of medicine is a magnificent desire on the part of those who have made a mark, and of all its humbler followers to “go about doing good.” The difficulties are enormous, the labour is colossal, but there could be no convictions were there no perplexities. Credulity is the disease of a feeble intellect. Accepting all things and understanding nothing, kills a man’s intellect and checks all scientific investigation. The physician has to knock at the temple of the human frame, and patiently pick up the knowledge which nature always gives to those who love her best. But the investigator must approach his subject with humility, and with the recognition that there is a limit to the human intellect, and that behind and above this big round world is a supreme being, that around the intellect is the atmosphere of spiritual convictions from which our highest and best impulses spring, that the universe not only embraces material phenomena, but it also includes the sublime and the moral attributes, which no man has, or ever will, weigh in the physical balance or distil from a retort.

The union of Intellect and Piety will grow stronger as the world grows older. When men began to think, they began to doubt, but when men have thought more deeply they will cease to doubt.

An idea is in the air that the study of science has a tendency to make men sceptical. This is an error. For surely the study of Nature in any of its manifold aspects has a direct tendency to lead us into the inscrutable. Amongst those who demonstrate the ennobling influence of science let us only name Boyle, Bacon, Kepler, and Newton. If we would select a few names from the number of medical celebrities of the past who have felt this elevating influence, the following will readily occur to us, Linacre, Sydenham, Brodie, Astley Cooper, Graves Watson, and Abernethy. The latter, who is chiefly remembered as a coiner of quaint sayings and personal originality, had, notwithstanding his biting wit, a deep sense of the nobility and the sacredness of his calling, as the following extract from a lecture which he delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons will prove. He says:—“When we examine our bodies we see an assemblance of organs formed of what we call matter, but when we examine our minds, we feel that there is something sensitive and intelligible which inhabits our bodies. We naturally believe in the existence of a first cause. We feel our own free agency. We distinguish right and wrong. We feel as if we were responsible for our conduct, and the belief in a future state seems indigenous to the mind of man.”

The noiseless tread of time will cause many doctors whose names are now household words to be forgotten, but we may rest assured that the wreath of memory will cluster round the brows of these grand, noble workers in the field of medicine who have shown by their daily life that they never flinched from the arduous duties, aye and the dangers of their profession, but steadfastly plodded on. Originality, integrity, and honesty are attributes which grace the life of any man, and although the history of medicine claims no monopoly of these virtues, for they serve all men alike, yet they are the handmaids of greatness; without them no human being will ever win that true success which enables us to look back upon such lives and say, “Here are examples which show us the possibilities of the race.” Doctors ought to be great burden lifters. Their mission is to carry into the chamber of disease—and even of death itself—that calm courage, that buoyant hope, which has around it a halo of sympathy and of encouragement.

The public are loyal to the profession of medicine, and seldom do we hear of any members of that calling who abuse their high privileges. Their work is an absorbing work; it says to a man:—“You have placed in your hands the lives of the human race. You are the true soldier whose business it is to give life and health and happiness to those with whom you come in contact. You must not lean upon the baubles of your calling, so as to inspire confidence, but you must night and day let the one abiding thought be concentrated upon the good of humanity,” and there is no field of professional experience which has given us so many men who have as nobly done their duty as the doctors of the past and of the present day. We seem to be on the threshold of a new era in the treatment of disease, and already do we find an increase in the average lives of the race. No one need despair of the future in that direction; indiscretion and ignorance kill more human beings than plague, pestilence, or famine. The public must help to tear away the veil which hides the Truth, by not worshipping at the foot of Quackery, Chicanery, or Superstition.

The medical profession has so far escaped the pernicious tendency of modern thought, which tendency is to hamper every institution. This is a noteworthy fact; our hospitals, medical schools, College of Physicians, and College of Surgeons are not cramped and hindered by legislative interference; but unostentatiously, silently, and with a never-failing sense of their responsibilities, do they educate and pass through their gates the doctors of the future—and no man dare point his finger at any one of these, and say he does not do his duty.

Magic and Medicine.

By Cuming Walters.

Coleridge once said that in the treatment of nervous cases “he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.” The great “faith cures” are worked by such physicians, and the dealers in magic at all times and in all parts achieved their successes by inspiring hope in their patients. The more credulous the invalid the more easy the cure, no matter what remedy is applied. Is it surprising, then, to find that among the more childlike races, or that among the infant civilizations, magic often supersedes medicine, or is combined with it? Ceremonies which impress the mind and act upon the imagination considerably aid the physician in his treatment of susceptible persons. Paracelsus himself combined astrology with alchemy and medicine, and his host of followers often went further than their master, and relied more upon magic than upon specific remedies. It was the crowd of charlatans, astrologers, wonder-workers, and their sort who substituted magic for medicine, and who had so great an influence in England three centuries ago, that Ben Jonson scourged with the lash of his satire in “The Alchemist,” the impostor described as

“A rare physician,
An excellent Paracelsian, and has done
Strange cures with mineral physic. He deals all
With spirits, he; he will not hear a word
Of Galen, or his tedious recipes.”

There has generally been sufficient superstition in all races to make amulets the popular means of averting calamity and preserving from sickness. The Greeks, the Romans, the Jews, the Turks, and the Arabs, to say nothing of less civilized races, have thoroughly believed that disease can be charmed away by the simple expedient of wearing a token, or carrying a talisman. The magical formula of Abracadabra, written in the form of a triangle, sufficed to cure agues and fevers; the Abraxas stones warded off epidemics; the coins of St. Helena served as talismans, and cured epilepsy. So strong was the belief in these magical protectors in the fourth century that the clergy were forbidden, under heavy penalties to make or to sell the charms, and in the eighth century the Christian Church forbade amulets to be longer worn. In this connection it may be mentioned that the custom of placing the wedding-ring upon the fourth finger of the left hand owes its origin to the ancients who resorted to magic for the cure of their ailments. The Greeks and the Romans believed that the finger in question contained a vein communicating directly with the heart, and that nothing could come in contact with it without giving instant warning to the seat of life. For this reason they were accustomed to stir up mixtures and potions with this “medicated finger,” as it was called, and when the ring became the symbol of marriage that finger was chosen of all others for the wearing of it. Thus do we unknowingly keep alive the superstitions of other times.

The Hindoos, whose books on the healing art date back to 1500 B.C., regarded sickness as the result of the operation of malevolent deities who were either to be propitiated by prayers, offerings, charms, and sacrifices, or to be overcome with the aid of friendly gods. The early Greeks when suffering from disease were cured, not by means of medicine, but by religious observances, and particularly by the “temple-sleep,” in which they dreamt dreams which the priests interpreted, and in which were found the suggestions for remedy. It was Hippocrates, in 460 B.C., who first proclaimed that disease was not of supernatural origin, and that it could not be combated or cured by magic. But for many centuries later in Europe the Black Art had greater sway than rational treatment. In Sweden it is even now common for the lower classes to ascribe sickness to the visitation of spirits (Nisse), who must be mollified by pouring liquor into a goblet and mixing with it the filings of a bride-ring, or filings of silver, or of any metal that has been inherited. The mixture is taken to the place where the man is supposed to have caught his illness, and is poured over the left shoulder, not a syllable being uttered the while. After the performance of this ceremony the invalid may hope to recover.

Consecrated grave-mould is supposed by many primitive races to have particular properties as a medicine. The Shetlander who has a “stitch in his side,” cures himself by applying to the affected part, some dry mould brought from a grave, and heated, care being taken to remove the mould and to return it before the setting of the sun. In the neighbouring isles of Orkney, magic is also resorted to as a remedy for disease. Perhaps the least harmful of the rites is the washing of a cat in the water which had previously served for an invalid’s ablutions, the confident belief being that the disease would by this means be transferred to the animal. This custom of “substitution” is found in many races, and is one of the most interesting subjects introduced to the student of folk-lore.

In Tibet, for example, when all ordinary remedies have failed, the Lamas make a dummy to represent the sick person, and they adorn the image with trinkets. By ceremonies and prayers the sickness of the patient is laid upon the dummy, after which it is taken out and burned, the Lamas appropriating the ornaments as a reward. Sir Walter Scott tells of a similar case which occurred in Scotland. Lady Katharine Fowlis made a model in clay of a person whom she wished to afflict, and shot at the image in the hope that the wound would be transferred to the real person. We have only to turn to Scott’s “Demonology and Witchcraft” to find hundreds of instances of the unshaken belief of the Highlanders in mystic potions, pills, drugs, and drops; and not even wholesale burnings of the dealers in white magic could induce the people to forsake their superstitions. Bessie Dunlop told the Court, before which she was arraigned, of the magic elixirs given to her by Thome Reid, who had been killed in battle centuries before, but had appeared to her as an apparition, and begged her to fly with him to Elf-land. By means of his medicines she cured the most stubborn diseases, obtained the reputation of a wise woman, and grew so rich that the eye of the law was drawn upon her, and, after her confession was made, she was ordered to be burnt. As Scott said, in one of his chapters, the Scottish law did not acquit those who accomplished even praiseworthy actions, and “the proprietor of a patent medicine who should in those days have attested his having wrought such miracles as we see sometimes advertised might have forfeited his life.”

The idea of sacrificing something, or someone, to appease the anger of the powers who bring affliction upon mankind, is extremely common, and by no means confined to savage nations or to very ancient times. At the time of the Black Plague in the fourteenth century the fanaticism of the French led them to sacrifice 12,000 Jews by torture and burning, these Israelites being deemed the cause of the affliction. In the “Ingoldsby Legends” may be read a ghastly account of a similar sacrifice in Spain, in order to secure the good-will of the over-ruling powers on behalf of the Queen. Even in comparatively modern times the practice of sacrificing in order to cure or avert disease has not been unknown, and this in civilized lands, too. The sacrifices in these cases have, of course, been of animals only, but the germ of the old and worse ritual is found in the custom. In 1767, the people of Mull, in consequence of a disease among the cattle, agreed to perform an incantation. They carried to the top of Carnmoor a wheel and nine spindles of oakwood. Every fire in the houses was extinguished; and the wheel was then turned from east to west over the nine spindles long enough to produce fire by friction. They then sacrificed a heifer, which they cut in pieces and burnt while yet alive. Finally they lighted their own hearths from the pile, while an old man repeated the words of incantation. This custom is prevalent in Ireland, in various parts of Scotland, and even in England and Wales it has been practised with variations and some modification. In Cornwall, in 1800, a calf was burnt alive to arrest the murrain. Mr. Laurence Gomme has traced the custom back to the sacrifice of animals for human sickness, for in 1678 four men were actually prosecuted for “sacrificing a bull in a heathenish manner for the recovery of the health of Custane Mackenzie.” In Ireland a cure for small-pox consisted in sacrificing a sheep to a wooden image, wrapping the skin about the sick person, and then eating the sheep.

In Scotland strange and weird customs linger, and Sir H. G. Reid in his entertaining volume, “’Tween Gloamin’ and the Mirk,” has related how he himself, during infancy, underwent a mysterious cure for the “falling sickness.” He was carried secretly away to a lonely hut on the distant moor, and the party were admitted to a long, low-roofed apartment, dimly lighted from two small windows. In one corner sat an old woman, wrinkled and silent, busily knitting; a huge peat-fire blazed on the open hearth, shooting heavy sparks up through the hole in the roof, and filling the apartment with smoke. No word was spoken, and the scene must have been as eerie as the lover of mystery or the believer in witchcraft could have desired. “I was placed on a three-legged stool in the middle of the floor” (the writer continues); “the old woman rose, and with the aid of immense tongs, took deliberately from the fire seven large smooth round stones, they were planted one by one in an irregular circle about me; with her dull dark eyes closed, and open white palms outstretched, the enchantress muttered some mystic words; it was over—the tremulous patient was taken up as ‘cured!’” In Scotland the belief in witches who have power both to cure and to cause maladies is so deeply founded that it would be rash to deny its continued existence. These creatures are credited with opening graves for the purpose of taking out joints of the fingers and toes of dead bodies, with some of the winding-sheet, in order to prepare powders. In Kirkwall a small portion of the human skull was taken from the graveyard and grated to a powder in order to be used in a mixture for the cure of fits; while in Caithness the patient was made to drink from a suicide’s skull, and the beverage so taken was regarded as a sovereign specific for epilepsy. In 1643 one John Drugh was indicted for this despoiling of corpses for some such purpose. The Australian aborigines had a belief not altogether dissimilar to this. They rubbed weak persons with the fat of a corpse, and thought that the strength, courage, and valour of the dead man was communicated to the body subjected to the treatment. Analogies may be found among savage tribes all over the world, and the culmination is found in the devouring of enemies, not out of revenge, but because the widespread primitive idea prevails that by eating the flesh and by drinking the blood of the slain, a man absorbs the nature or the life of the deceased into his own body. In other words, cannibalism has a medical origin which the most depraved superstition suggested and fortified.

The Lhoosai, a savage hill-tribe in India, teach their young warriors to eat a piece of the liver of the first man they kill in order to strengthen their hearts, and here we see the development of the magic power of the medicines which is not only efficacious for the body, but for the spirit.

When Coleridge was a little boy at the Blue Coat School, he relates in his Table Talk, there was a “charm for one’s foot when asleep,” which he believed had been in the school since its foundation in the time of King Edward VI. Its potency lay in the words—

“Crosses three we make to ease us,
Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus.”

The same charm served for cramp in the leg, and Coleridge quaintly adds: “Really, upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then repeating this charm, I can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did not go away in a few seconds.” Charms like this, by which a simple method of cure is invested with marvel, are common enough among primitive races, and not infrequently provide the key to the solution of the mystery of the magician’s triumph. The cunning leaders, priests, or medicine-men of ignorant nations maintain their ascendency by ascribing to miracle the simplest feats they perform.

The superstitious red man is completely at the mercy of the medicine-man who claims to possess supernatural powers, and who assumes the ability to work marvellous cures by magic. Each North American Indian carries with him a medicine bag obtained under very curious circumstances. When he is approaching manhood he sets forth in search of the patent drug which is to shield him from all danger, and act as an all-powerful talisman. He lies down alone in the woods upon a litter of twigs, eats and drinks nothing for several days, and at last falls asleep from sheer exhaustion. Then he dreams—or should do so—and whatever bird, or beast, or reptile, forms the subject of his dream, he must seek as his medicine. He goes forth upon the quest directly his strength has returned, and when he has discovered the animal of his vision, he turns its skin into a pouch, and wears it ever afterwards round his neck. In peace or war he will never part with this talisman; it is the treasure of his life, a sacred possession, a charm against all maladies, and a protection from foes. It is scarcely necessary to add, after this, that the medicine-man of the tribe is held in highest honour, and regarded as a worker of veritable miracles. All things are possible to him. By his prayers, his rites, and his incantations he causes the sun to shine, the rain to descend, the rivers to deepen, the plants to thrive. A traveller tells us that a drought had withered the maize fields, and the medicine-man was sent for to compel the rain to fall. On the first day one Wah-ku, or the Shield, came to the front, but failed; so did Om-pah, or the Elk. On succeeding days another was tried, but without success; but at last recourse was made to Wak-a-dah-ha-Ku, or the White Buffalo Hair, who possessed a shield coloured with red lightnings, and carried an arrow in his hand. Much was expected of him, and the people were not disappointed. “Taking his station by the medicine-lodge,” we are told, “he harangued the people, protesting that for the good of his tribe he was willing to sacrifice himself, and that if he did not bring the much desired rain he was content to live for the rest of his life with the old women and the dogs. He asserted that the first medicine-man had failed because his shield warded off the rain clouds; the second, who wore a head-dress made of a raven’s skin, because the raven was a bird that soared above the storm, and cared not whether the rain came or stayed; and the third who wore a beaver skin, because the beaver was always wet and required no rain. But as for him, the red lightnings on his shield would attract the rain-clouds, and his arrow would pierce them, and pour the water over the thirsty fields. It chanced that as he ended his oration, a steamer fired a salute from a twelve pounder gun. To the Indians the roar of the cannon was like the voice of thunder, and their joy knew no bounds. The successful medicine-man was loaded with valuable gifts; mothers hastened to offer their daughters to him in marriage; and the elder medicine-men hastened from the lodge to enrol him in their order.... Just before sunset his quick eyes discovered a black cloud which, unobserved by the noisy multitude, swiftly came up from the horizon. At once he assumed his station on the roof of the lodge, strung his bow, and made ready his arrow; arrested the attention of his fellows by his loud and exultant speech; and as the cloud impended over the village, shot his arrow into the sky. Lo, the rain descended in torrents, wetting the rain-maker to the skin, but establishing in everybody’s mind a firm and deep conviction of his power.”

The influence of the medicine-man in time of sickness is illustrated in the narrative of Mr. Kane, who wrote “The Wanderings of an Artist.” He heard a great noise in one of the villages, and found that a handsome Indian girl was extremely ill. The medicine-man sat in the middle of the room, crossed-legged and naked; a wooden dish filled with water was before him, and he had guaranteed to rid the girl of her disease which afflicted her side. He commenced by singing and gesticulating in a violent manner, the others who surrounded him beating drums with sticks. This lasted half-an-hour. Then the medicine-man determined on a radical cure of the patient, for he darted suddenly upon the girl, dug his teeth into her side (for she was undressed), and shook her for several minutes. This increased her agony, but the medicine-man declared he had “got it,” and held his hands to his mouth. After this he plunged his hands into a bowl of water, leaving the spectators to believe that he had torn out the disease with his teeth, and was now destroying it by drowning. Eventually he withdrew his hand from the bowl, and it was found that he held a piece of cartilage between the finger and thumb. This was cut in two, and half cast into the fire, half into the water. So ended the operation, and Mr. Kane records that though the doctor was perfectly satisfied, the patient seemed, if anything, to be worse for the treatment.

The belief in magic was ingrained in the Egyptians, who, notwithstanding that the art of medicine was far advanced with them, preferred to trust in the workers of miracles and enchantments. In his recent collection of Egyptian Tales, Mr. Flinders-Petrie is able to supply a striking instance of this credulity. A man named Dedi was said to have such powers over life and death that he could restore the head that had been smitten from the body. He was brought before the King, who desired to put this marvellous power to the test, and the story thus proceeds:—“His Majesty said, ‘Let one bring me a prisoner who is in prison that his punishment may be fulfilled.’ And Dedi said, ‘Let it not be a man, O King, my lord; behold we do not even thus to our cattle.’ And a duck was brought unto him, and its head was cut off. And the duck was laid on the west side of the hall, and its head on the east side of the hall. And Dedi spake his magic speech. And the duck fluttered along the ground, and its head came likewise; and when it had come part to part the duck stood and quacked. And they brought likewise a goose before him, and he did even so unto it. His Majesty caused an ox to be brought, and its head cast on the ground. And Dedi spake his magic speech. And the ox stood upright behind him, and followed him with his halter trailing on the ground.” This story prepares us in every way for the information that the Egyptians, despite their great knowledge of the curative powers of herbs and drugs, preferred to rely upon enchanters, soothsayers, and magicians in their time of illness and peril.

Professor Douglas, in his “Society in China,” devotes a very interesting and entertaining chapter to medicine as regarded and practised by the Celestials. From this we learn that while there are plenty of doctors in the land, they are one and all the merest empirics, who prey on the folly, the ignorance, and the dread of the uneducated people. The failure to cure any disease brings no odium upon the quack, though when the late Emperor “ascended on a dragon to be a guest on high,” or, in other words, died of small-pox, his physicians who could not save him from that distinction were deprived of honours and rewards. The Chinese are centuries behind other nations in medicine, and they have not yet learnt that the blood circulates in the body, or that a limb may be removed with beneficial effects in case of some diseases or accidents. They believe that arteries and veins are one and the same, and that the pulses communicate with the various organs of the body. The object of the physician is to “strengthen the breath, stimulate the gate of life, restore harmony.” “The heart is the husband, and the hinges are the wife,” and they must be brought into agreement, or evil arises. Good results may be obtained, it is believed, by such tonics as dog-flesh, dried red-spotted lizard-skins, tortoise-shell, fresh tops of stag-horns, bones and teeth of dragons (when obtainable), shavings of rhinoceros-horns, and such like. For dyspepsia the doctor has no nostrum, but he thrusts a needle into the patient’s liver and expects him to be immediately cured. When cholera or any other pestilence sweeps over the land, the Chinese feel the helplessness of their physicians, so they resort to charms, and to the offering of gifts to the gods by way of staying the plague. Hydrophobia is common among the half-starved curs which infest the streets, and the cure for it—quite unknown to Pasteur—is the curd of the black pea dried and pulverised, mixed with hemp oil, and formed into a large ball; this is to be rolled over the wound, then broken open, and kept on rolling until it has lost its hair-like appearance. To complete the cure the patient must abstain from eating “anything in a state of decomposition.” He might just as well be told not to poison himself. If, by the way, the prescription does not work, but hydrophobia continues, the patient is strongly commended to try the effect of “the skull, teeth, and toes of a tiger ground up, and given in wine in doses of one-fifth of an ounce.” While the tiger is being caught, however, a fatal result may occur, but of course the Chinese doctor is not to be blamed for that. He has done his best, and the fault is obviously the tiger’s. The Chinese believe in astrology, the philosopher’s stone, and the elixir of life. A plant known as ginseng is said to greatly prolong and sweeten existence, and sometimes as much as a thousand taels of silver are given for a pound’s weight of the precious root. It will be seen, therefore, from such facts as these that a Galen in China would have a vast revolution to undertake, and that a thousand Galens at least would be required to overcome the prejudices and uproot the superstitions of the race. The great value which the Chinese attach to the bones, horns, tusks, and eyes of animals may be judged from various tonics and remedies which are in great request among all classes. A dose of tigers’ bones inspires courage; an elephant’s eye burnt to powder and mixed with human milk is a sovereign remedy for inflammation of the eye; pulverised elephants’ bones cure indigestion; a preparation of elephants’ ivory is the recognised cure for diabetes; and the same animal’s teeth may be used for epilepsy. But if the patient cannot eat rice his case is abandoned as hopeless, and not even the physician who deals most extensively in magic pills, ointments, and decoctions will attempt to save the obstinate person’s life.

The medicine-men of the Eskimos were called angekoks, and enjoyed the unlimited confidence of the people. They were said to have equal power over heaven and earth, this world and the next. This made them useful as friends and dangerous as enemies. The Eskimo, therefore, set out upon no enterprise without consulting the angekoks, who granted blessings, exorcised demons, and gave charms against disease. These medicine-men have a profound belief in themselves, and though they resort to jugglery and ventriloquism to deceive their visitors, they appear to have no idea that they are perpetrating an imposture. Their particular powers, they think, are derived from more than human sources. Dr. Nansen, in his “Eskimo Life,” points out that it has always been to the interests of the medicine-men and the priests to sustain and mature superstitions or religious ideas. “They must therefore themselves appear to believe in them; they may even discover new precepts of divinity to their own advantage, and thereby increase both their power and their revenues.” The Greenlanders believe that the angekoks work with the help of ministering spirits, called tôrnat, who are often none other than the souls of dead persons, especially of grandfathers; but not infrequently the tôrnat are supposed to be the souls of departed animals, or of fairies. The angekok is assumed to have several of these councillors always at hand. They render help in the time of danger, and may even act as avengers or destroyers. In the latter case they show themselves as ghosts, and so frighten to death the persons against whom vengeance is directed. Therefore, as Dr. Nansen reports, the angekoks are the wisest and also the craftiest of all Eskimos. They assert that they have the power of conversing with spirits, of travelling in the under-world, of conjuring up powerful spirits, and of obtaining revelations. “They influence and work upon their countrymen principally through their mystic exorcisms and seances, which occur as a rule in the winter, when they are living in houses. The lamps are extinguished, and skins hung before the windows. The angekok himself sits upon the floor. By dint of making a horrible noise so that the whole house shakes, changing his voice, bellowing and shrieking, ventriloquising, groaning, moaning, and whining, beating on drums, bursting forth into diabolical shrieks of laughter and all sorts of other tricks, he persuades his companions that he is visited by the various spirits he personates, and that it is they who make the disturbance.” They cure diseases by reciting charms, and “give men a new soul.” He demands large fees, not for himself, he explains, but for the spirits whose agent he is. Apparently these spirits have similar ideas to the London consulting physician.

Mr. Theodore Bent, in his “Ruined Cities of Mashonaland,” gives a specimen of the credulity excited by the medicine-men. The explorer desired to interview a chief, Mtoko by name, but permission was refused. The reason, he afterwards ascertained, was that the chief’s father had died shortly after another white man’s visit, and the common belief was that he had been bewitched. The chief thought that the “white lady” who ruled over the nation to which Mr. Bent belonged had sent him purposely to cast a glamour over him. It may be remembered that the ill-fated Lobengula refused to have his portrait taken because he believed that by means of the image of himself he could be magically infected with a dread disease. This idea of substitution, which has already been referred to, is akin to that of the belief in witchcraft during the middle ages—namely, that the witches could, by sticking pins into the wax image of a person, bring upon that person agonising maladies. The dreadful results of such beliefs among savage tribes is told by the two hospital nurses who a year or so ago produced a lively book, “Adventures in Mashonaland.” One morning a native entered their camp, bringing a tale of horror. A chief called Maronka, whose kraal was about forty miles away, had boiled his family alive. He had been convinced by the native doctors that after death the souls of the chiefs passed into the bodies of lions. His medicine-men had “smelt out” his own family as witches, and boiling alive was the requisite punishment. Mr. Rider Haggard has told many such stories as this in his books on South Africa. The Zulu doctors were in the habit, not only of “smelling out” witches and evil spirits, but of sprinkling the soldiers with medicine, in order to “put a great heart into them,” and ensure their victory in battle.

Customs like these gave Charles Dickens his opportunity of writing two of his most scathing satires “The Noble Savage” and “The Medicine Man of Civilisation.” He refused to subscribe to the popular and amiable sentiment that the African barbarian was an interesting survival, or that the Ojibbeway Indian was picturesque. After a severe indictment of them, Dickens instanced their customs in medicine as a proof of their irremediable depravity. “When the noble savage finds himself a little unwell,” he wrote, “and mentions the circumstance to his friends, it is immediately perceived that he is under the influence of witchcraft. A learned personage, called an Imyanger, or Witch Doctor, is sent for to Nooker the Umtargartie, or smell out the witch. The male inhabitants of the kraal being seated on the ground, the learned doctor, got up like a grizzly bear, appears and administers a dance of the most terrific nature, during the exhibition of which remedy he incessantly gnashes his teeth, and howls,—‘I am the original physician to Nooker the Umtargartie. Yow, yow, yow! No connection with any other establishment. Till, till, till! All other Umtargarties are feigned Umtargarties, Boroo, Boroo! but I perceive here a genuine and real Umtargartie, Hoosh, Hoosh, Hoosh! in whose blood, I, the original Imyanger and Nookerer, will wash these bear’s claws of mine!’ All this time the learned physician is looking out among the attentive faces for some unfortunate man who owes him a cow, or who has given him any small offence, or against whom, without offence, he has conceived a spite. Him he never fails to Nooker as the Umtargartie, and he is instantly killed.” This is no burlesque, and I have given the record in Dickens’s inimitable language because it most vividly sets before us the custom of the medicine-men of barbarous races. But the medicine-men of Longfellow’s description, the men who came to appease and console Hiawatha, who

“Walked in silent, grave procession,
Bearing each a pouch of healing,
Skin of beaver, lynx, or otter,
Filled with magic roots and simples,
Filled with very potent medicines,”

—these may be accepted as the milder type of magicians who, among a primitive people, claimed not only to be able to heal the living, but to restore the dead.

Mr. Austine Waddell, in his exhaustive work on the Buddhism of Tibet, tells us that a very popular form of Buddha is as “the supreme physician” or Buddhist Æsculapius, the idea of whom is derived from an ancient legend of the “medicine-king” who dispensed spiritual medicine. The images of this Buddha are worshipped as fetishes, and they cure by sympathetic magic. The supplicant, after bowing and praying, rubs his finger over the eye, knee, or particular part of the image corresponding to the affected part on his own body, and then applies the finger carrying this hallowed touch to the afflicted spot. Mr. Waddell says that this constant friction is rather detrimental to the features of the god; whether it is beneficial to the man’s body is of course largely a matter of faith and circumstances. As might be expected, talismans to ward off evils from malignant planets and demons, whence come all diseases, are in great request. The eating of the paper on which a charm has been written is considered by the Tibetan to be the easiest and most certain method of curing a malady, and the spells which the Lamas use in this way are called “za-yig,” or edible letters. A still more mystical way of applying these remedies, according to Mr. Waddell, is by the washings of the reflection of the writing in a mirror, a habit common in other quarters of the globe. In Gambia, for instance, this treatment is relied upon by the natives. A doctor is called in, he examines the patient, and then sits down at the bedside and writes in Arabic characters on a slate some sentences from the Koran. The slate is then washed, and the dirty infusion is drunk by the patient. In Tibet, Chinese ink is smeared on wood, and every twenty-nine days the inscription reflected in a mirror. The face of the mirror during the reflection is washed with beer, and the drainings are collected in a cup for the patient’s use. This is a special cure for the evil eye. The medicine-men of Tibet can also supply charms against bullets and weapons, charms for the clawing of animals, charms to ward off cholera, and even charms to prevent domestic broils. This is surely evidence of high civilisation.

It would be hopeless to endeavour to exhaust this subject. Only a few selected instances can be given to illustrate how large a part magic has played, and still plays, in the healing art. Medicine is by no means freed of its superstitions yet, and the success of quack advertisements of the day abundantly proves that the civilised public is still prone to believe that universal remedies are obtainable, and that miracles can be wrought.

Modern medical science, as one of its great exponents has pointed out, plays a waiting game when miracles are spoken of, and when magic is claimed to supersede specific remedies. “When it is asked to believe in the violent and erratic violation of laws of matter and force, science stands on an impregnable rock, fenced round by bulwarks of logical fact, and flanked by the bastions of knowledge of nature and her constitution.” And as exact knowledge spreads, Prospero will have no alternative but to break his staff, and bury it fathoms deep.

Chaucer’s Doctor of Physic.

By W. H. Thompson.

In the “Canterbury Tales” we have an inimitable gallery of fourteenth century portraits, drawn from life, with all a great master’s delicacy of finish and touch. And in none of these pictures does Chaucer excel himself more than in that of his “Doctor of Physic.” We may take it for granted that the portrait is no mere fanciful one, with its pre-Raphaelite minuteness of detail, sketched with the poet’s own peculiar skill. With what mischievous and yet altogether playful and good-natured humour is the man of medicine presented to us!

“With us there was a doctour of phisike
In all this world ne was there none like him
To speak of phisike and of surgerie.”

What manner of man was this paragon of medical knowledge? In personal appearance he was somewhat of an exquisite. “Clothes are unspeakably significant” saith the immortal Teufelsdrockh, and every practitioner who has his clientele largely yet to make knows the importance of being well dressed. Chaucer’s grave graduate was apparelled in a purple surcoat, and a blue and white furred hood.

“In sanguine and in perse he clad was all
Lined with taffata and with sendall,”

and yet no luxurious sybarite by any means was he,

“Of his diet measureable was he,
For it was no superfluity,
But of great nourishing and digestable.”

A man of simple habits, even perhaps given to holding his purse strings somewhat tightly.

“He was but easy of expense,
He kept that he won in pestilence.”

For, as the poet adds with his characteristic merry sly humour,

“Gold in physic is a cordial,
Therefore he loved gold in special.”

The science of medicine since Chaucer’s day has made extraordinary advances, and it is only fair to judge his doctor by contemporary standards. To-day, we fear, he would be largely regarded as little better than a charlatan and a quack. It is true, he was acquainted with all the authorities, ancient and modern, from Æsculapius and Galen down to Gaddesden, the author of the “Rosa Anglica,” the great English book of fourteenth century medicine. But this last named luminary of physic would aid him very little on the road to true knowledge. This medical “Rose,” which Leland calls a “large and learned work,” only serves to illustrate the impotence of the professors of the healing arts at that period. This is the recipe of Gaddesden for the small-pox. “After this (the appearance of the eruption) cause the whole body of your patient to be wrapped in red scarlet cloth, and command everything about the bed to be made red. This is an excellent cure. It was in this manner I treated the son of the noble king of England when he had the small-pox, and I cured him without leaving any marks.” To cure epilepsy, he orders the patient “and his parents” to fast three days, and then go to church. “The patient must first confess, and he must have mass on Friday and Saturday, and then on Sunday the priest must read over the patient’s head the gospel for September, in the time of vintage after the feast of the Holy Cross. After this the priest shall write out this portion of the gospel reverently, and bind it about the patient’s neck, and he shall be cured.” If epilepsy was to be exorcised by such a remedy as this, we venture to assert that it must have been largely a case of faith-healing.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

(From Harleian M.S.—4866 fol. 91.)

Seeing then that such was the condition of the science of medicine in Chaucer’s days, we must take with a good deal of reservation his statement that his doctor

“Knew the cause of every malady
Were it of cold, or hot, or moist, or dry,
And where engendered, and of what humour.”

Anyhow, some of the remedies prescribed for the “sick man,” and the “drugs,” which his friends the apothecaries were so ready to supply, would have seemed extraordinary enough to us.

The poet tells us the doctor’s study was but “little in the Bible,” and that though a “perfect practitioner,” the ground of his scientific knowledge was astronomy, i.e., astrology; the “better part of medicine,” as Roger Bacon calls it. In dealing with his patients he was guided by “natural magic.”

To this practice Chaucer alludes in another of his poems, the “House of Fame.”

“And clerks eke, which con well,
All this magic naturell,
That craftily do her intents,
To make in certain ascendents,
Images—lo through which magic,
To make a man be whole or sick.”

So that in spite of what appears to us the charlatanry in his make up, the doctor was supposed to be a person of importance in the eyes of his fellow pilgrims, with quite the standing of an accredited medical man of to-day, is evidenced by the manner in which mine host Bailly addresses him. Master Bailly was no particular respecter of persons, indeed, on the contrary, he was somewhat of a Philistine; yet he was all respect to this man of medicine. It is as “Sir” Doctor of Physic, the host addresses him; also declaring him to be a “proper man,” and like a prelate. After the story of chicanery related by the Canon’s Yeoman, it is to the physician he looks to tell a tale of “honest matter.” Such is his bearing towards him throughout.

The doctor’s contribution to the “Canterbury Tales,” too, is of a serious, sober kind, in keeping with his character; and concludes with some sound moral advice. Therefore, whatever foibles he may have, the “doctor of physic” is presented to us as a sterling gentleman, no unworthy predecessor of those who to-day, on more modern lines, still follow in his footsteps.

The Doctors Shakespeare Knew.

By A. H. Wall.

In Walckenaer’s “Memoirs of Madame de Sévigné,” and in the amusing, interesting volume which Gaston Boissier devoted to her works and letters, we have glimpses of the medical profession in France, which show us it was in her time and country, just what it was in England in the same century when it was known to Shakespeare. For one more or less genuine physician there were thousands of charlatans and quacks, and the contempt which our great dramatic poet frequently expresses in his works for medical practitioners must, in fairness, be regarded as applicable to the latter, not to the former. In 1884, an American writer on this subject (Dr. Rush Field, in his “Medical Thoughts of Shakespeare”) strove to show that our great philosophic poet and playwright’s opinion of all the medical practitioners was a low one. “He uses them frequently,” he says, “as a tool by which deaths are produced through the means of poison, and generally treats them with contempt.” That he might fairly do this, and that in doing it he rather displayed respect and regard for the genuine, more or less scientific professors of the healing art, can be very readily demonstrated by anyone at all familiar with his plays. But to return to Madame de Sévigné. At a time when she was growing old, when her letters speak so sadly of the dying condition of Cardinal de Retz at Commercy, of Madame de la Fayette’s being consumed by slow fever, and La Roche confined to his armchair by gout, of Corbinelle’s threatened insanity, and of his taking “potable gold” as a remedy for headache, she writes also of small-pox and other fevers having permanently settled at Versailles and Saint-Germain, where the King and Queen were attacked, and ladies and gentlemen of the Court were decimated, and cases of apoplexy and rheumatism were rapidly increasing in every direction. “Fashionable folk, used up with pleasure-making, sick through disappointed ambition, fidgetting without motive, agitating without aim, tainted with morbid fancies and suspicion,” found themselves in the doctor’s hands, and were far more ready to select practitioners who promised magically swift and easy cures, than those who spoke of slow and gradual recovery by means which were neither painless nor pleasurable. “Everybody,” says Boissur, “women included, battled with one another to possess marvellous secrets whereby obstinate complaints should be immediately cured. Madame Fouquet applied a plaster to the dying Queen, which cured her, to the great scandal of the Faculty unable to save her; and the Princess de Tarente served out drugs to all her people at Vitre.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

(The Stratford Portrait.)

Madame Sévigné wrote of her as “the best doctor in the upper classes; she has rare and valuable compounds of which she gives us three pinches with prodigious effect.” When writing to her daughter, she begs her not to neglect taking such medicines as “cherry water,” “extract of periwinkles,” “viper-broth,” “uric acid,” and “powdered crab’s-eyes.” She says the extract of periwinkles “endowed Madame de Grignam with a second youth.” Writing to her daughter, “If you use it, when you re-appear so fair people will cry, ‘O’er what blessed flower can she have walked,’ then I will answer ‘On the periwinkle.’” She tells, too, how the Capuchins, who still retained their ancient medical reputation, treated the rheumatism in her leg “with plants bruised and applied twice a day; taken off while wet twice a day, and buried in the earth, so that as they rotted away her pains might in like way decrease.” “It’s a pity you ran and told the surgeons this,” she says to her daughter, “for they roar with laughter at it, but I do not care a fig for them.” In like way Madame de Scudery tells Bassy, “There is an abbé here who is making a great bother by curing by sympathy. For fever of all kinds, so they say, he takes the patient’s spittle and mingles it with an egg, and gives it to a dog; the dog dies and the patient recovers.... They say he has cured a quantity of people.”

Turning from these illustrations of medical practice in France to see how identical it is with that adopted in England when Shakespeare lived, we recall the advice of that eminent gentleman, Andrew Rourde, who recommends people to wash their faces once a week only, using a scarlet cloth to wipe them dry upon, as a sure remedy in certain cases. In other instances we find that certain pills made from the skulls of murderers taken down from gibbets, and ground to powder for that purpose, were popular as medicine, that a draught of water drunk from a murdered man’s skull had wonderful medicinal properties, and that the blood of a dragon was absolutely miraculous in the cures it effected. The touch of a dead man’s hand was another ghastly remedy in common use, and the powder of mummy was a wonderful cure for certain grave complaints. Love-philtres were also regarded from a medicinal point of view, and the strange doings of quack accoucheurs are not less absurdly terrible. That the seventeenth century physician himself was not always proof against these products of ancient ignorance and superstition, is abundantly apparent. Van Helmont, the son of a nobleman, born in Brussels, and very carefully educated for his profession, practised both medicine and magic medicinally. He rejected Galen, inclined to that illiterate pretender Paracelsus, and determined that the only way by which he could defy disease, and utterly destroy it, was through what he called Archæus. Speaking of digestion, for instance, he denied that it was either chemical or mechanical in its nature, but the result of this Archæus, a spiritual activity, working in a very mysteriously complicated way, for both evil and good. It has been said that he was one of Lord Bacon’s disciples, but for that assertion there certainly is no sufficient foundation, for Bacon, if a mystic by inclination, was logical in reasoning. In England Van Helmont had an English follower in the person of another physician, Dr. Fludd, a disciple of the famous inventor of the camera obscura, and conjecturally the first photographer. His grand quack remedy was “the powder of sympathy,” which was the “sword-salve” of Paracelsus (composed of moss taken from the skull of a gibbetted murderer, of warm human blood, human suet, linseed oil, turpentine, etc.). This was applied, not to the wound, but to the sword that inflicted it, kept “in a cool place!” Certain plants pulled up with the left hand were regarded as a sure remedy in fever cases, but the gatherer, while gathering, was not to look behind, for that deprived the plants of their medicinal value.

Amongst other physicians of Shakespeare’s century was Mr. Valentine Greatrake, who came to London from Ireland, where his supposed magical cures had been awakening a great sensation. He hired a large house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to which vast crowds of patients of all kinds and conditions crowded daily, all clamouring to be cured. He received them in their order, says an eye-witness, with “a grave and simple countenence.” For, as Shakespeare wrote, “Thus credulous fools are caught.” (“Comedy of Errors,” 1, 2.) Greatrake (afterwards executed for high treason) asserted that every diseased person was possessed by a devil, and that by his prayers and laying on of hands the devil could be cast out. Lord Conway sent for him to cure an incurable disease from which his wife was suffering, and even some of the most learned and eminent people of the time were amongst his patrons. St. Evremond wrote, “You can hardly imagine what a reputation he gained in a short time. Catholics and Protestants visited him from every part, all believing that power from heaven was in his hands.”

In an Act of Parliament which was passed in the year 1511, we read, in its preamble, that “the science and cunning of Physic and Surgery” was exercised by “a great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part have no manner of insight in the same, nor in any other kind of learning—some also can read no letters in the book—so far forth that common artificers, as smiths, weavers, and women, boldly and accostumably took upon them great cures, and things of great difficulty, in which they partly used sorceries and witchcraft, and partly supplied such medicines unto the diseased as are very noisome, and nothing meet therefore; to the high displeasure of God,” etc.

A large number of the pretended remedies thus used in medical practice are clearly traceable back to the ancient Magi, who were professors of medicine, as well as priests and astrologers.

With these facts before you, turn to your Shakespeare, and see how he regarded the popular delusions thus created and fostered, with their

“Distinguished cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such libertines of sin.”
—Comedy of Errors.

Do you remember the other lines from this source, in which the poet speaks of “This pernicious slave,” who “forsooth took on him as a conjurer, and, gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse, and with no face, as’t were, outfacing me, cried out I was possessed.” This is not the stern, grave doctor in “Macbeth,” who did not pretend to “raze out the written troubles of the brain,” but said, “Therein the patient must minister unto himself.” There is no depreciation of the healing art in Shakespeare’s painting of Lear’s physician, as there is of the “caitiff wretch” of an apothecary, who sold poison to Romeo in a very different way to that in which the physician in Cymbeline supplied a deadly drug to the Queen. “I beseech your grace,” says he, speaking in solemn earnestness, “without offence (my conscience bids me ask) wherefore you have commanded of me these most poisonous compounds.” In “All’s well that Ends Well,” you will recognize the foregoing descriptions of medicinal delusions in the interview between Helena and the King, who says, we “may not be so credulous of cure, when our most learned doctors leave us, and the congregated college have concluded that labouring art can never ransom Nature from her maid estate, I say we must not so stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope, to prostitute our past-cure malady to empirics.” In this play both “Galen and Paracelsus” are mentioned, and their names then represented rival schools of medicine.

How smartly and merrily Shakespeare wrote of such cures as Greatrake professed to effect, we see in Henry VI., where Simpcox, supposed to be miraculously cured of blindness, is asked to and does describe what he sees, “If thou hadst been born blind, thou might’st as well have known all our names as thus to name the several colours we do wear.”

In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” we have “Master Caius that calls himself doctor of physic,” and is called by Dame Quickly a “fool and physician.” The two were in Shakespeare’s time very commonly combined, and often, as we have shown, very strangely. Dr. Caius was a real name borne by a learned gentleman who was physician to Queen Elizabeth. In Cymbeline the name of the physician is Cornelius. This again was the name of a real physician, who, in the sixteenth century, gained great reputation in Europe chiefly by restoring Charles V. to health after a tediously long illness. We may presume that Shakespeare was familiar with the fact.

Amongst the doctors of our poet’s time it was a common custom to throw up cases when they believed them hopeless. Shakespeare’s Sempronius says, “His friends, like physicians, thrice gave him o’er,” and Lord Bacon in his work on “The Advancement of Learning,” says of Physicians, “In the enquiry of diseases, they do abandon the cures of many, some as in their nature incurable, and others as past the period of cure, so that Sylla triumvirs never prescribed so many men to die as they do by their ignorant edicts.” We have spoken of the sword-salve cure for wounds. Of dealers in poison who visited fairs and market-places, and attracted crowds by the aid of a stage fool, we get a glimpse in “Hamlet,” where Laertes says:—

“I bought an unction of a mountebank,
So mortal, that but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood, no cataplasm so rare
Collected from all simples that have virtue,
Under the moon can save the thing from death.”

There is a hit at doctors who gave others remedies they had not enough faith in to adopt for themselves:—

“Thou speak’st like a physician, Helicarnus:
Who minister’st a potion unto me
That thou would’st tremble to receive thyself.”
—Pericles.

In the same play the true physician receives full appreciation. Cerimon says of himself:—

“’Tis known, I ever
Have studied physic, through which secret art,
By turning o’er authorities, I have
Together with my practice, made familiar
To me, and to my aid, the blest infusions
That dwell in vegitives, in metals, stones.
And I can speake of the disturbances
That nature works, and of her cures; which doth give me
A more content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honour,
Or tie my treasure up in silken bags,
To please the fool, and death.”

And one of the two listening gentlemen adds:—

“Your honour has through Ephesus pour’d forth
Your charity, and hundreds call themselves
Your creatures, who by you have been restored.”

And Pericles, with his supposed dead wife in his arms, turning to Cerimon, who has saved her from the grave, says:—

“Reverend Sir,
The gods can have no mortal officer
More like a god than you.”

And Gower, speaking the concluding lines of the play, adds:—

“In reverend Cerimon there well appears
The worth that learned charity aye wears.”
“Cerimon: I hold it ever
Virtue and cunning (wisdom) were endowment greater
Than nobleness and riches....”

There was, perhaps, when Shakespeare wrote the above lines, some thought of the Elizabethan nobleman, Edmund, Earl of Derby, who “was famous for chirurgerie, bone-setting, and hospitalite,” as Ward says in his Diary; of the Marquis of Dorchester, who in his time was a Fellow of the College of Surgeons; or of the poet’s son-in-law, Dr. Hall, a gentleman who resided in Stratford-on-Avon, in a fine old half timber house still standing, and known as Hall’s Croft. To his wife, the poet’s elder daughter, Shakespeare bequeathed his house and grounds, which Dr. Hall occupied when he died. His grave is near that of his glorious father-in-law, and on it is the following inscription:—

“Here Lyeth Y^e Body of John Hall,
Gent: He Marr: svsanna Y^e daughter
and co heire of Will. Shakespeare,
Gent. Hee Deceased Nove^r 25 a^o 1635
aged 60.
Hallius hic situs est medica celeberrimus arte
Expectans regni gaudia læta Dei
Dignus erat meritis qui Nestora vinceret annis,
In terris omnes, sed rapit aequa dies;
Ne tumulo, quid desit adest fidissima conjux
Et vitæ Comitem nunc quoque mortis habet.”

Dickens’ Doctors.

By Thomas Frost.

Dickens, it must be admitted by even the greatest admirers of his inimitable genius, among whom the writer of this paper must be counted, was not successful in his delineations of the medical profession. Though his most humorous as well as his most pathetic pictures of human life are drawn from the humbler walks in the pilgrimage of humanity, he has given us some good touches of his skill in his presentments of other professions, and notably of lawyers and lawyers’ clerks. Nothing in fiction can excel his legal characters in, for instance, “Bleak House,”—his Mr. Tulkinghorn, Mr. Guppy, the clerk, and Mr. Snagsby, the law stationer. But a life-like doctor cannot be found in his works, and the nearest approaches to such a description are the merest sketches.

The most strongly marked of these are Dr. Parker Peps and Mr. Pilkins, the two members of the faculty who officiate at the closing scene in the life of Mrs. Dombey, in which a sense of humour, with difficulty suppressed by the author, mingles with the touching sadness of the death. Dr. Parker Peps, “one of the Court physicians, and a man of immense reputation for assisting at the increase of great families,” is introduced “walking up and down the drawing-room with his hands behind him, to the unspeakable admiration of the family surgeon, who had regularly puffed the case for the last six weeks among all his friends and acquaintances as one to which he was in hourly expectation, day and night, of being summoned in conjunction with Dr. Parker Peps.” But in this little interlude, the two actors in which do not appear again, the obsequiousness of Mr. Pilkins to the Court physician, and the manner in which the latter, with assumed obliviousness, substitutes “her grace, the duchess” or “her ladyship” for Mrs. Dombey, verge on caricature, a tendency Dickens seems to have had at all times some difficulty in resisting.

Of Dr. Slammer also we have only a sketch, and that of the slightest character. Though he is described as “one of the most popular personages in his own circle,” we gather from the incidents in which he appears only that he was very irascible. As we read of his furious jealousy of Jingle, and the interrupted duel with Winkle, who had received his challenge to the former by mistake, we wonder at the circle in which this “little fat man, with a ring of upright black hair round his head, and an extensive bald plain on the top of it,” was one of the most popular personages. Harold Skimpole, we are told, had been educated for the medical profession; but his training seems to have left no traces of it upon his character or his conversation. He prefers to dabble in literature and music for his own amusement, and look to his friends for the means of living, too prosaic an occupation for himself.

One of the best, but not quite the best, of the medical characters in Dickens’ novels, is Allan Woodcourt, who “had gone out a poor ship’s surgeon, and had come home nothing better,”—the young man hastily called in when the death of Nemo is discovered, in conjunction with “a testy medical man, brought from his dinner, with a broad snuffy upper lip, and a broad Scotch tongue.” Allan Woodcourt has the kindness of heart which characterises the profession, and exemplifies it very pleasingly in the scene with the brickmaker’s wife, and with poor Jo, the forlorn waif who is kept continually moving on by the police. How tenderly, too, he deals with Richard Carstone, the weak-minded victim of the long-drawn Chancery suit. And his head is as sound as his heart is soft. “You,” says Richard to him, “can pursue your art for its own sake, and can put your hand to the plough and never turn; and can strike a purpose out of anything.” What a world of difference we see in this briefly sketched trait to the want of earnestness of purpose and steadfastness of pursuit in the character of young Carstone!

Even stronger testimony to the good qualities of Allan Woodcourt is borne by Mr. Jarndyce. Allan, says that gentleman, is “a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men’s sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all, if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose; but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is the kind I care for. It is Woodcourt’s kind.” The love passages of this estimable young man with the equally estimable Esther Summerson, one of Dickens’ most charming presentments of English maidenhood, are very pleasing, and none of them more so than one which occurs towards the close of the story.

There is another medical character in one of the Christmas stories which, good as it is, might have been made better but for the extent to which the exigencies of space limited the author in the development of character in that class of stories. I mean Dr. Jeddler, the genial but mistaken father of Grace and Marion, in “The Battle of Life.” The doctor is “a great philosopher, and the heart and mystery of his philosophy was to look upon the world as a gigantic practical joke; as something too absurd to be considered seriously by any practical man. His system of belief had been in the beginning part and parcel of the battle ground on which he lived.” He is not of the cynical school, but a modern Democritus, whose inclination to laugh at everything on the surface of the ocean of life was irresistible, while there was nothing in the conditions of his existence to suggest anything that was beneath. When he hears his daughters conversing about their lovers, “his reflections as he looked after them, and heard the purport of their discourse, were limited at first to certain merry meditations on the folly of all loves and likings, and the idle imposition practised on themselves by young people who believe for a moment that there could be anything serious in such bubbles, and were always deceived—always.”

Dr. Jeddler is a widower; we are not told what his experiences of married life had been. Had they been unhappy, one would suppose that he would have been more disposed to be cynical and pessimistic than to regard life’s incidents as provocative of merriment, yet, if they had been happy, why should he have regarded the engagement of Grace as an idle folly, a bubble on life’s surface, soon to burst? Dickens’ explanation is, from this point of view, scarcely satisfactory. “He was sorry,” says the novelist, “for her sake—sorry for them both—that life should be such a very ridiculous business as it was. The doctor never dreamed of inquiring whether his children, or either of them, helped in any way to make the scheme a serious one. But then he was a philosopher. A kind and generous man by nature, he had stumbled by chance over that common philosopher’s stone (much more easily discovered than the object of the alchemist’s researches) which sometimes trips up kind and generous men, and has the fatal property of turning gold to dross, and every precious thing to poor account.”

But when sorrow had humbled the doctor’s heart, he felt that the world in which some love, deep-anchored, is the portion of every human creature, was more serious than he had thought it, and understood “how such a trifle as the absence of a little unit in the great absurd account had stricken him to the ground.” Then, when he and his daughters are again together in the old home, and his arms are about them both, we find him acknowledging that “It’s a world full of hearts, and a serious world with all its folly,—even with mine, which was enough to swamp the whole world.”

It is to be observed, however, that while we find all the traits and incidents of professional life in the lawyers of Dickens’ creation, there is little or nothing of the kind in his doctors. Such traits are abundant in his presentments of Tulkinghorn, and Kenge, and Vholes in Wickfield, and many others that might be named; but they are so completely absent from his portrayals of Allan Woodcourt and Dr. Jeddler, that the two men might as well have been of any other profession, without any loss to the stories in which they appear. If we compare them with his lawyers, or with the clergymen of Mrs. Oliphant, we are struck at once with the difference.

CHARLES DICKENS.

This is not the case, however, when from the full-blown medical practitioner, adding to his name the initials M.D. or M.R.C.S., we descend to the “sawbones in training,” as the facetious Sam Weller designates the young men qualifying themselves for the exercise of the profession by “walking the hospitals.” The medical students of the novelist’s early days were—it would perhaps be fairer to say that a large proportion of them were—a turbulent and disorderly element in the social life of the metropolis. The newspapers of the day record their frequent appearances at the Bow Street and Marlborough Street police-courts on charges of rowdyism in the streets at or after midnight, when they came out from their favourite places of amusement, the Coal Hole, in the Strand, the Cider Cellars, in Maiden Lane, and the Judge and Jury Club, in Leicester Square, the latter presided over by Renton Nicholson, who edited a vile publication called The Town. Their after-amusements were found in strolling through the streets in threes and fours, singing at the top of their voices comic songs, that often outraged propriety, ringing door bells, and chaffing the police. Dickens must often in his reporting days have witnessed the next morning appearances of these young men at Bow Street police-court.

The first appearance of two specimens of this variety of the immature medico in the humorous pages of the “Pickwick Papers” is described as follows in the low cockney vernacular of Sam Weller. “One on ’em,” he tells Mr. Pickwick, “has got his legs on the table, and is a-drinkin’ brandy neat, vile the tother one—him in the barnacles—has got a barrel of oysters atween his knees, vich he’s a-openin’ like steam, and as fast as he eats ’em he takes a aim with the shells at young Dropsy, who’s a-sittin’ down fast asleep in the chimbley corner.” The latter gentleman is Mr. Benjamin Allen, who is described by the novelist as “a coarse, stout, thick-set young man, with black hair cut rather short, and a white face cut rather long. He was embellished with spectacles, and wore a white neckerchief. Below his single-breasted black surtout, which was buttoned up to his chin, appeared the usual number of pepper-and-salt coloured legs, terminating in a pair of imperfectly polished boots. Although his coat was short in the sleeves, it disclosed no vestige of a linen wristband, and although there was quite enough of his face to admit of the encroachment of a shirt-collar, it was not graced by the smallest approach to that appendage. He presented altogether rather a mildewy appearance, and emitted a fragrant odour of full-flavoured Cubas.”

This gentleman’s companion is Mr. Bob Sawyer, “who was habited in a coarse blue coat which, without being either a great-coat or a surtout, partook of the nature and qualities of both,” and “had about him that sort of slovenly smartness and swaggering gait which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious description. He wore a pair of plaid trousers and a large rough double-breasted waistcoat: out of doors he carried a thick stick with a big top. He eschewed gloves, and looked, upon the whole, something like a dissipated Robinson Crusoe.” The conversation of these budding surgeons is perfectly in harmony with their outward aspect. Their discourse, when it assumes a serious character, is of the “cases” at the hospital and the “subjects” at the time being on the dissecting tables of the anatomical lecture-rooms. When relieved from attendance at the hospitals, they lounge at tavern bars, and flirt with barmaids and waitresses, to whom their attentions are not unfrequently of an objectionable character, and less agreeable than they imagine them to be.

The contrast between the graphic power displayed by Dickens in his delineation of the characters of Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, and the indistinctiveness, as to profession, of his presentments of Allan Woodcourt and Dr. Jeddler, may help us to understand the causes which render his doctors so much less effective than his lawyers. The legal profession presents more variety than the medical, and comes before us more prominently in conjunction with incidents of a striking character, as may be seen every day in the newspaper records of the courts of law and of police. The physician and the surgeon stand as much apart, in these respects, from the busy barrister or solicitor as the clergy do. Dickens has not given us a clerical portrait, and probably for a similar reason. Mrs. Oliphant, on the other hand, excels in her delineations of every grade of the Anglican hierarchy; but her genius as a writer of fiction runs in a groove essentially different from that of Dickens.

Famous Literary Doctors.

By Cuming Walters.

Medical men have not so commonly made literature an extra pursuit, or adopted it as a serious calling, as have the members of the other liberal professions. It is quite expected that a clergyman should write poems, philosophical essays, and perhaps even a novel with a purpose; and it is usual to recruit the ranks of critics extensively from the law, and to trust to briefless barristers for a continuous supply of romances. No detail is more frequently discovered in the biographies of eminent authors than that they were called to the Bar, and either never practised or forsook practising in order to engage in literary labours. Indeed, it might almost seem that failure in law was the most important step towards success in authorship. No such rule applies, however, to medical men, and no such comment would be justified in their case. Not only do we find the writing of books—otherwise than text-books and technical treatises—rarer with them, but it curiously happens that in most instances it has been the successful practitioner, not the man walking the hospitals or waiting for calls, who has turned author. And we shall find that these medico-literati (if I may coin the phrase) have often been among the most hard-working in their profession, and the wonder is that they were able to enter upon a second pursuit and to follow it with so much zeal. For, in most of the examples I shall advance, literature was more than a pastime with these men who indulged in it. It was chosen by some for its lucrativeness, and by the majority for its capacity to enhance their reputation or to bring them enduring fame. This much may be safely said, that the names of many excellent doctors would have faded from public remembrance ere this, and would have passed away with the generation to which they belonged, had not literature given them lasting luminance. In not a few instances the fact is already forgotten or wholly ignored that certain successful writers once wrote “M.D.” after their names. Who cares that the author of that classic “Religio Medici” took his degrees at Leyden and at Oxford, and dispensed medicine to the end of his life? Who cares that the author of “The Borough,” “Tales in Verse,” and “The Parish Register,” was apprenticed to a surgeon? Who cares that the writer of such dramas as “Virginius,” “William Tell,” and “The Hunchback,” was trained for a physician? Who cares that the author of “Roderick Random,” “Peregrine Pickle,” and “The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker” was a surgeon’s assistant and acted as surgeon’s mate in the unfortunate Carthagena expedition, before trying (unsuccessfully) to obtain a practice in London? And, above all, who cares that the author of “The Deserted Village” and “The Vicar of Wakefield” studied physic in Edinburgh and on the Continent, and, as Boswell was informed, “was enabled to pursue his travels on foot, partly by demanding at Universities to enter the lists as a disputant, by which, according to the custom of many of them, he was entitled to the premium of a crown, when luckily for him his challenge was not accepted?” Such are a few of the examples which immediately occur to the mind when the whole subject is contemplated.

It would be impossible in the compass of a short article to deal systematically and comprehensively with doctors who became authors, or to make out a complete list of their names with an account of the works which entitled them to the designation. Any facts now adduced must be considered arbitrary and capricious, so far as the choice of them is concerned; and sequence is so little attempted that the reader will pardon, I trust, a possible leap from Galen to Goldsmith, from Sir Thomas Browne to Tobias Smollett, and from Sir John Blackmore to Conan Doyle. I put aside those members of the profession who have simply written on professional subjects. Their name is legion, but in the great majority of cases such work as this would not strictly justify their inclusion among the literati. And, on the other hand, we cannot find a place in the category for such men as Gœthe or Sainte-Beuve, for though both studied medicine, it seems to have been purely with a view to the extension of their knowledge and not with any more practical or material object. Sainte-Beuve, it is true, for a short time in his youth entertained some thought of adopting the profession; but Gœthe only dipped into the subject with the same spirit that he dipped into experimental chemistry and astrology.

Let us, then, refer to a few types certain of instant recognition. The most notable of modern instances is Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a specialist in his profession, a hard-working physician, and the author of valuable treatises on medical art, who nevertheless occupied the position of being among the four chief poets whom America has produced, and one of the most versatile of the littérateurs of the century. He went to the Paris Medical Schools shortly after he had graduated at Harvard; he practised as a physician at Boston; and for nearly forty years he was Professor of Physiology. Yet he had time to write the most delightful and original of philosophical essays, to publish novels of which at least one—“Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny”—will rank as a classic; to deliver orations and after-dinner speeches in sparkling verse, and to write exquisite poems in rich and felicitous language on a wonderful variety of themes, the complete collection of which makes a very substantial volume. In all his work Dr. Holmes showed himself to be the profound student of nature and of humanity with many varying interests; yet we can often trace the hand of the physician in the work of the essayist and poet. His novels were special studies which only the ardent physiologist and metaphysician would have cared to discuss, or, at all events, would have discussed so well. Both “Elsie Venner” and “The Guardian Angel” deal with the occult problems of heredity, and those problems are treated with the power of the specialist in certain branches of science. Still more strongly is the character of the medical man displayed in a number of the poems, some by reason of their subject, and some by the figures and imagery they contain. The well-known “Stethoscope Song” will immediately suggest itself in illustration. But, for purposes of quotation, I prefer a less popular poem of rare beauty, which more strikingly manifests the writer’s power of transmuting the hard dry facts of science into light and gleaming poetry. I refer to what he called at first “The Anatomist’s Hymn,” but afterwards “The Living Temple.” It is one of the interpolated poems in the “Autocrat” series of papers, and to my thinking invests the human body and its physical functions with unimagined charms.

Take, for instance, this poetic exposition of our respiration, the scientific correctness and exactness of which need no explanation to readers of this volume:—

“The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves,
Whose streams of brightening purple rush
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay
The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature’s flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart.
No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
For ever quivering o’er his task,
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then kindling each decaying part
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.
But warmed with that unchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason’s guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master’s own.”

There is an almost irresistible temptation to linger over Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’ books, so intensely interesting is his personality and so fascinating is his work. But several other eminent poets of the profession demand attention. To Crabbe’s connection with surgery I have already incidentally referred, and inasmuch as he early abandoned the calling for the ministry, little need be said except that his youthful experience may have aided him in writing a scathing denunciation of the Quack, who believed wholly in the potence of “oxymel of squills,” and of the Parish Doctor, who “first insults the victim whom he kills.” The poet was a severe castigator, and was never less forbearing with the lash than when these impostors of his day were under his hand for flagellation. In Mark Akenside we come to a better specimen of the class which we are considering. At the age of twenty he went to Leyden, and three years later became, (as Dr. Johnson writes) “a doctor of physick, having, according to the custom of the Dutch Universities, published a thesis.” In the same year he published “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” his greatest work. This was followed by a collection of odes, but he still sought a livelihood as a physician. Little success attended him, however, and Dr. Johnson records that Akenside was known as a poet better than as a doctor, and would have been reduced to great exigencies but for the generosity of an ardent friend. “Thus supported, he gradually advanced in medical reputation, but never attained any great extent of practice, or eminence of popularity. A physician in a great city,” his biographer continues musingly, “seems to be the mere play-thing of Fortune; his degree of reputation is, for the most part, totally casual; they that employ him, know not his excellence; they that reject him, know not his deficiency.” Yet it was otherwise with Sir Samuel Garth, doctor and poet, of whom Johnson himself records that “by his conversation and accomplishments he obtained a very extensive practice.” His principal poem was “The Dispensary,” relating to a controversy of the time between the College of Physicians, who desired to give gratuitous advice to the poor, and the Apothecaries, who wished to keep up the high price of medicine. Garth was “on the side of charity against the intrigues of interest, and of regular learning against licentious usurpation of medical authority,” as Johnson put it; and he sprang into favour, was eventually knighted, and became physician-general to the army. His last literary work, and his worst, was a crude but ostentatious preface to a translation of Ovid. As a matter of fact his writing was invariably mediocre, and Pope, in calling attention to the fact that the “Dispensary” poem had been corrected in every edition, unkindly remarked that “every change was an improvement.” John Phillips, who may be ranked among the physicians, though it is doubtful whether he practised, enjoyed a better fate as a man of letters than did either Akenside or Garth. He sprang into sudden popularity by the publication of a whimsical and clever medley called “The Silver Shilling,” and this he followed up by a sort of official commemoration of the victory of Blenheim. His greatest achievement was a poem in two books on “Cider,” and he was meditating an epic on “The Last Day” when he died, at the early age of thirty-three. One curious fact about his writings, small as it is, is worthy of mention. He sang the praises of tobacco in every poem he wrote, except that on Blenheim.

Dr. Johnson did not rate Phillips very highly; he said that what study could confer he obtained, but that “natural deficience cannot be supplied.” The sturdy doctor, however, did his utmost to rehabilitate the damaged reputation of Blackmore, whom we may regard as the most remarkable of all the compounds of physician-poets with whom we can become acquainted. Blackmore obtained an undeserved success, which was followed by unmerited ridicule, and Johnson, who hated every form of injustice, constituted himself his champion. For the truth about Blackmore we must seek the medium between the extremes of Johnson’s praise and of the censure of his enemies—the “malignity of contemporary wits,” as Boswell termed it. When all is said and done the fact remains that Blackmore was a man of uncommon character, and a prodigious worker. His first work, a heroic poem in ten books, on Prince Arthur, was written, he related, by “such catches and starts, and in such occasional uncertain hours as his profession afforded, and for the greatest part in coffee-houses, or in passing up and down the streets.” This work passed through several editions with rapidity, and two extra books were added to it. The King knighted him and gave him other advances, but the critics furiously assailed him, and his name became a by-word for all that was heavy and ridiculous in poetry. Notwithstanding this he persevered, and published successively a “Paraphrase on the Book of Job,” a “Satire on Wit,” “Elijah,”—an epic poem in ten books—“Creation, a Philosophical Poem,” “Advice to Poets how to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough,” “The Nature of Man,” “Redemption,” “A New Version of the Psalms,” “Alfred”—an epic in twelve books—“A History of the Conspiracy against King William,” and a host of others which his perverted reason or fantastic fancy suggested. Never, perhaps, was known such a voluminous author, or one so erratic in his system. What with his long heroic poems, his treatises on smallpox and other diseases, his theological controversies, his “Advices” to painters, poets, and weavers, and his prose contributions to periodical publications, “England’s Arch-Poet” (as Swift described him) could never have idled away an hour. Of all that he wrote, a few passages from his “Arthur” and “Creation” are alone remembered, and but for Johnson’s good-natured attempt to save him from oblivion, his name would only have lived in the satires of his remorseless critics. One saying of Blackmore’s only is worth noting here. He had laid himself open to the imputation of despising learning, and Dr. Johnson himself thought him a shallow ill-read man. But Blackmore said:—“I only undervalued false or superficial learning, that signifies nothing for the service of mankind; as to physic I expressly affirmed that learning must be joined with native genius to make a physician of the first rank; but if those talents are separated, I asserted, and do still insist, that a man of native sagacity and diligence will prove a more able and useful practiser than a heavy notional scholar encumbered with a heap of confused ideas.”

One or two other doctors who in their time enjoyed a reputation as writers, but whose fame was transient, or, at least, is insecure, call for very brief notice before we pass on to a few of greater importance. Sir John Hill, M.D., an eighteenth century physician, was a fairly extensive litterateur, and in addition to producing treatises on botany, medicine, natural history, and philosophy, wrote half a dozen novels, and several dramas. His chef d’œuvre was “The Vegetable System,” a work of such magnitude that it ran to twenty-six volumes, a copy of which was presented to the King of Sweden, and procured for the author the distinction of being included in the Order of the Polar Star. Dr. William Fullarton Cumming, a son of Burns’ “Bonnie Leslie,” was compelled to travel in mild climates for his health, and as a result wrote “The Notes of a Wanderer,” a work abounding in poetic descriptions of the charming scenery of the East. He tells us that the real pleasure of travelling is not to boast of how many lions one may have slain in a single day, but to saunter about without an object, to inhale the moral atmosphere of places visited, to enter bazaars, not to buy, but to catch the hundred peculiarities of a new people, to stray hither and thither watching the work and the recreations of other races. John Chalmers, M.D. (not to be confused with the great divine, Dr. Thomas Chalmers), also deserves to be noted as a very graceful writer of romantic stories; and Sir Henry Thompson, under the name of “Pen Oliver,” produced some years ago a strange little volume which enjoyed a season’s success—“Charley Kingston’s Aunt.”

That most diffident and most delightful of authors, Dr. John Brown, who gave us the memorable “Rab and his Friends,” was in practice at Edinburgh. As long as lovers of the animal creation are to be found, the story of Rab and of Marjorie will be read; and these sketches of brutes whom he almost humanised will probably outlive the genial doctor’s more ambitious “Horæ Subsecivæ” and “John Leech and other Papers.” Of a very different nature was the author of “Ten Thousand a Year,” Dr. Samuel Warren, physician, lawyer, politician, novelist, and office-seeker. Tittlebat Titmouse is not much studied now, for the type is out-of-date, and the society of which the novel treats, the abuses prevalent, the general corruption which prevailed in public life, were exposures intended for a past generation. Yet there are passages in the work which should save it from absolute neglect, and it has for over half a century kept its author’s name alive. This is more than his “Passages from the Diary of a late Physician” could have done, or those dozen other works with the bare titles of which the present reading public is scarcely acquainted. John Abercrombie, the chief consulting physician in Scotland during the last century, sought and achieved literary fame with two volumes on “The Intellectual Powers,” and “The Moral Feelings.” They enjoyed a popularity scarcely commensurate with their actual merits.

David Macbeth Moir, who faithfully performed the arduous duties of a medical practitioner in Edinburgh, and whose life was almost wholly devoted to the service of his fellows, was the famous “Delta” of Blackwood’s Magazine. His poems, some four hundred of which he contributed to “Maga.” alone, are out of fashion now, though their delightful vein of reflectiveness and their charm of expression should preserve them from absolute neglect. The heavy labours of his profession did not seem to check his literary productiveness. His poems fill two large volumes; his prose works are by no means meagre or unimportant, and his “Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the past Half-century,” is a standard work on the poetry of his period. Medical treatises, too, came from his pen; and his “Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor,” is one of the most agreeable of genuine Scotch sketches. His biographer correctly summed up the merits of the worthy doctor as a literary worker in the words “Good sound sense, a simple healthy feeling, excited and exalted though these may be, never fail him. He draws from nature, and from himself direct.” Quiet humour and simple pathos, a love of humanity, deep reverential feeling, and originality of thought—all these are found in “Delta’s” writings, and serve, with his own admirable nature, to keep his memory green.

Of Dr. Conan Doyle, the most conspicuous instance of the hour of the doctor turned author, no detailed notice is requisite, as the main facts of his career are sufficiently well known, and his literary work promises to bring him both fame and fortune. Undoubtedly he exemplifies the fact that the medical hand can scarcely be concealed when it takes to the pen, for his novels and stories abound in allusions which only his study, training, and experience as a doctor could suggest. His reading and observation largely provide the technique of his romances. Something of the same could be said of Smollett’s work, though the medical knowledge of the author was often turned to less agreeable account. In fact, most of Smollet’s references on this score were the reverse of delectable, and I refrain from a more precise examination of them. The unexpected use to which Mr. R. D. Blackmore has turned his knowledge of medicine—for he studied medicine as well as law seriously in his youth—in several of his novels, notably in the last, “Perlycross,” has excited much interest and attention among the profession. So marked is this that I cannot refrain quoting from a singularly interesting criticism penned by a leading physician in the Midlands. “The medical incidents in ‘Perlycross,’” he says, “are pourtrayed with an accuracy which shows an intimate knowledge of the profession and its members.... No doubt the opinions expressed by one learned doctor were those of the time represented in the story, though they could hardly be received with justice in the present day. Speaking of the illness of Sir Thomas Waldron, he says (p. 18):—‘At present such a case could be dealt with best in Paris, although we have young men rising now who will make it otherwise before very long.’ The key to this difficulty is found later on (p. 159) where the technical word ‘introsusception’ is mentioned as the disease or condition from which the patient suffered. At the time spoken of Parisian surgeons, headed by the eminent Dupuytren, excelled in the art of surgery; at the present time such a case could be treated as well by any hospital surgeon in England as in the metropolis of France.... The book contains an admirably-described case of catalepsy, which is equally well explained. The cure of the attack is described with consummate skill and power. The keystone of the whole position of medical knowledge is contained in a few words towards its close. In these days of rapid transition from one excitement to another it would be well to take the lesson to heart, and to remember what the author speaks of as two fine things—‘If you wish to be sure of anything see it with your own good eyes,’ and the second, ‘Never scamp your work.’ How these sayings may be applied in the practice of the profession may with profit be learned from a perusal of the pages of ‘Perlycross.’” Perhaps I am going too far in claiming Mr. Blackmore as a medical man who has taken to literature, but the excuse of his early training, combined with this curious result of it manifested in his writing, proves irresistible.

Not to stray, however, but to get our feet once more upon solid ground, we may refer to a classic example, with which this article, had it been aught else but discursive, should have begun. Galen, the Greek physician, must be counted among the first and most famous of his class who have written literary works. He was so voluminous a writer on philosophical subjects that scores of books on logic and ethics have been fathered upon him without much question arising as to the unlikelihood of his being the author of so many. As it is he is credited with eighty-three treatises, the genuineness of which is not disputed; there are nineteen suspected to bear his name unjustly, forty-five are proved to be spurious, and then there remain a further fifteen fragments and fifteen commentaries on Hippocrates, which may be accepted as his in part or whole. He made himself master of the medical, physiological, and scientific knowledge of his time. He was born in 130 A.D., and died in 201, and left a record of that period. In addition to preparing this massive work, he seems to have found time to devote himself to various branches of philosophy with such success that later writers were well pleased to trade with the talisman of his name. Were it worth while to go back to antiquity, and to the history of foreign nations for further examples of physicians whose writings were not confined to expositions of the medical system, Averrhoes, most famous of Arabian philosophers, and physician to the calif, a master of the twelfth century, would occupy a prominent position. But it is more to our purpose to draw attention to the remarkable career, and one that deserves to be held in remembrance, of Arthur Johnston, physician to King Charles the First. In the same year that he graduated at the university of Padua (1610) he was “laureated poet at Paris, and that most deservedly,” as Sir Thomas Urquhart recorded. He was then only three-and-twenty years of age, and the prospect of many years being before him, he indulged in extensive travel, and visited in turn most of the principal foreign seats of learning. His journeying over, he settled in France and became equally well known as a physician and as a writer of excellent Latin verse. A courteous act, characteristic of the time, secured him the favour and patronage of the English royal family, for in 1645 he published an elegy on James I., and followed this up by dedicating a Latin rendering of the Song of Solomon to King Charles. Other specimens of his rare culture and his poetical powers were forthcoming, and he achieved a European reputation. His Latin translation of the Psalms is held to be unexcelled by any other, unless it be Buchanan’s, and the fact that his translation is still in use sufficiently attests its excellence and value. He died suddenly in 1641, while on a visit to Oxford, and in the centuries which have succeeded he has not been displaced in the front rank of refined and deeply versed Latin scholars and poets.

It would be a matter of considerable difficulty to make a complete list of literary doctors, but enough has perhaps been written to show that they are no small band so far as numbers go, and that their influence in the world of books has been very considerable and distinguished. We owe to them many great works of enduring repute, of value to the student, of perpetual entertainment to the general reader. When, too, we consider the willingness and the zeal with which the writing members of the medical profession have imparted their knowledge, we are led to believe that they accepted as their motto the noble utterance of Sir Thomas Browne, the chief of literary doctors:—“To be reserved and caitiff in goodness is the sordidest piece of covetousness, and more contemptible than pecuniary Avarice. To this (as calling myself a Scholar) I am obliged by the duty of my condition: I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure of knowledge; I intend no Monopoly, but a community, in learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves. I envy no man that knows more than myself, but pity them that know less. I instruct no man as an exercise of my knowledge, or with an intent rather to nourish and keep it alive in mine own head than beget and propagate it in his; and in the midst of all my endeavours there is but one thought that dejects me, that my acquired parts must perish with myself, nor can be Legacied among my honoured Friends.”

The “Doctor” in time of Pestilence.

By William E. A. Axon, f.r.s.l.

“I do not feel in me those sordid and unchristian desires of my profession; I do not secretly implore and wish for Plagues, rejoice at Famines, revolve Ephemerides and Almanacks in expectation of malignant Aspects, fatal Conjunctions, and Eclipses.”—Sir Thomas Browne’s “Religio Medici,” pt. ii., sec. ix.

Of the great epidemics which have from time to time devastated Europe, Great Britain has had its full share. Between 664 and 1665 there were many visitations, resulting in heavy mortality, to which the general name of plague or pestilence has been given, although they were not always identical in form. Often the dread sisters Famine and Pestilence went hand in hand in the domains of merrie England in the good old times.

The Statute of Labourers declares, no doubt with perfect truth, that “a great part of the people, principally of artisans and labourers,” died in the pestilence known as the Black Death of 1349, which had important consequences, socially and politically. There were many subsequent outbreaks, though they fortunately did not attain to the enormous proportions of the great mortality. We have from the graphic hand of Chaucer a life-like portrait of a medical man of the fourteenth century who had gained his money in the time of pestilence.

At the end of the fifteenth and middle of the sixteenth century, we have as alternating with bubo plague, the Sudor Anglicanus. Its appearance coincided with the invasion by which Richard III. lost his crown, and his rival became Henry VII. Dr. Thomas Forrester, who was in London during the outbreak of 1485, gives instances of suddenness with which the “sweat” became fatal. “We saw two prestys standing togeder and speaking togeder, and we saw both of them die suddenly.” The symptoms were sweating, bad odour, redness, thirst, headache, “and some had black spots as it appeared in our frere Alban, a noble leech, on whose soul God have mercy.” Forrester complains of the quacks who put letters on poles and on church doors, promising to help the people in their need. He lays stress upon astrological causes, but does not overlook the defective sanitation which gave the plague some of its firm hold. The Sudor Anglicanus returned in 1508, 1517, 1528, and 1551. The last visitation was the occasion of a treatise by the worthy Cambridge founder, to whom Gonville and Caius College owes so much.

“The Boke of Jhon Caius aganst the sweatyng Sickness” is an interesting document. It opens with a long autobiographical passage as to his previous literary labours, which have ranged from medicine to theology. At first he wrote in English, but afterwards in Latin and Greek. The reason for this change is stated. “Sence y^t that tyme diverse other thynges I have written, but with the entente never more to write in the Englishe tongue partly because the cōmodite of that which is so written, passeth not the compasse of Englande, but remaineth enclosed within the seas, and partly because I thought that labours so taken should be halfe lost among them which set not by learnyng. Thirdly, for that I thought it best to auoide the judgment of the multitude from whom in maters of lernyng a man shal be forced to dissente, in disprouyng that which they most approue, and approuyng that which they most disalowe. Fourthly for that the common settyng furthe and printīg of every foolishe thyng in englishe, both of phisicke vnperfectly and other matters vndiscretly diminishe the grace of thynges learned set furth in thesame. But chiefely because I would geve none example or comfort to my countrie men (whō I would to be now, as here tofore they have been, comparable in learnyng to men of other countries) to stande onely in the Englishe tongue, but to leaue the simplicitie of the same, and to procede further in many and diuerse knowledges both in tongues and sciences at home and in uniuersities, to the adornyng of the cōmon welthe, better service of their kyng, and great pleasure and commodite of their own selues, to what kind of life so euer they should applie them.” But his resolution not to write again in the vulgar tongue was broken by considerations of utility, for he saw that it could not be very serviceable to ordinary English people to give them advice as to the treatment of the sweating sickness in a language which they did not understand. In his account of this dire malady, he lays stress upon errors and excess of diet as a strongly co-operating cause. “They which had thys sweat sore with perille or death, were either men of welthe, ease and welfare, or of the poorer sorte such as wer idls persones, good ale drinkers, and Tauerne haunters. For these, by ye great welfare of the one sorte, and large drinkyng of thother, heped up in their bodies moche evill matter: by their ease and idlenes, coulde not waste and consume it.” Against the infection of bad air he recommends avoiding carrion “kepyng Canelles cleane” and other general sanitary precautions. He suggests that the midsummer bonfires were intended for purging the air, “and not onely for vigils.” Rosewater and other perfumes are to be used, and he thinks it would be well to clear the house of its rushes and dust. It is to be feared that the rushes which served instead of carpets, even in great houses, were not renewed very frequently. The handkerchief was to be perfumed, and the patient was to have in his mouth “a pece either of setwel, or of the rote of enula campana wel steped before in vinegre rosate, a mace, or berie of Juniper.”

Dr. Caius, like Dr. Forrester, did not omit to warn his readers that even with the aid of his book a medical man was still necessary, and in doing so he gives us a glimpse of the quack doctors of the sixteenth century. “Therefore seke you out a good Phisicien, and knowen to haue skille, and at the leaste be so good to your bodies, as you are to your hosen or shoes for the wel-making or mending wherof, I doubt not but you wil diligently searche out who is knowē to be the best hosier or shoemaker in the place where you dwelle: and flie the unlearned as a pestilence to the comune wealth. As simple women, carpenters, pewterers, brasiers, sope ball sellers, pulters, hostellers, painters, apotecaries (otherwise then for their drogges), auaunters thēselves to come from Pole, Constantiple, Italie, Almaine, Spaine, Fraunce, Grece, and Turkie, Inde, Egipt or Jury: from y^e seruice of Emperoures, kinges, and quienes, promisīg helpe of al diseases, yea vncurable, with one or two drinckes, by waters sixe monethes in continualle distillinge, by Aurum potabile, or quintessence, by drynckes of great and hygh prices as though thei were made of the sūne, moone, or sterres, by blessynges, and Blowinges, Hipocriticalle prayenges, and foolysh smokynges of shirts, smockes, and kerchieffes, wyth such other theire phantasies and mockeries, meaninge nothng els, but to abuse your light belieue, and scorne you behind your backes with their medicines, so filthie, that I am ashamed to name theim, for your single wit and simple belief, in trusting thē most which you know not at al, and vnderstad least: like to them which thinke farre foules have faire fethers, although thei be never so euil fauoured & foule: as though there could not be so conning an Englishman, as a foolish running stranger (of others I speak not) or so perfect helth by honest learning, as by deceiptfull ignorance.”

Dr. Caius laid stress upon exercise as an aid to health, but some popular games he thought “rather a laming of legges than an exercise.” We need not follow him in the details of the treatment he recommends if in spite of the adoption of his preventive regime, the sweating sickness should come.

In 1561 there was issued “A newe booke conteyninge an exortacion to the sicke.” The tract ends with the following parody on the nostrums current for the cure of the pestilence: “Take a pond of good hard penaunce, and washe it wel with the water of your eyes, and let it ly a good whyle at youre hert. Take also of the best fyne fayth, hope, charyte yt you can get, a like quantite of al mixed together, your soule even full, and use this confection every day in your lyfe, whiles the plages of God reigneth. Then, take both your handes ful of good workes commaunded of God, and kepe them close in a clene conscience from the duste of vayne glory, and ever as you are able and se necessite so to use them. This medicine was found wryten in an olde byble boke, and it hath been practised and proved true of mani, both men and women” (Collier’s Bib. Account, i. 74).

The wealthy, on an outbreak of the plague, fled from the infected city, as we may learn from Boccaccio, and from Miles Coverdale’s translation of Osiander’s sermon, “How and whether a Christian man ought to flye the horrible plage of the pestilence,” which appeared in 1537.

During the plague of London, in 1603, the physicians are asserted by Dekker to have “hid their synodical heads,” but this is at all events not wholly true. Thomas Lodge, the poet, was also a graduate in medicine, and in his “Treatise on the Plague”—not the only one published in relation to this epidemic—we are told of his experiences of the plague-stricken city. He gives some good advice in relation to the sanitary measures to be taken for the prevention of the plague.

The nature of the regulations devised in the Tudor times to ward off infection may be gathered from the rules laid down at Chester in November, 1574, when

“the right Worshipful Sir John Sauage, Knight, maior of the City of Chester had consideracion of the present state of the said cite somewhat visited with what is called the plage, and divisinge the best meanes and orderlie waies he can, with [the advice] of his Bretheren the alderman, Justices of peace within the citie aforesaid (through the goodness of God) to avoid the same hath with such advice, sett forth ordained and appointed (amongst other) the points, articles, clauses, and orders folowing, which he willeth and commandeth all persons to observe and kepe, upon the severall pains theirin contayned:

“Imprimis. That no person nor persons who are or shalbe visited with the said sickness, or any other who shall be of there company, shall go abrode out of there houses without license of the alderman of the ward such persons inhabite, And that every person soe licensed to beare openlie in their hands ... three quarters long ... ense ... shall goe abrode out of the ... upon paine that eny person doynge the contrary to be furthwith expulsed out of the said citie.

“2. Item if any person doe company with any persons visited, they alsoe to beare ... upon like payne.

“3. Item that none of them soe visited doe goe abroad in any part or place within the citie in the night season, upon like payne.

“4. Item that the accustomed due watche to be kepte every night, within the said citie, by the inhabitants thereof.

“5. Item the same watchman to apprehend and take up all night walkers and such suspect as shalbe founde within and to bring them to the Justice of peace, of that ... the gaile of the Northgate, that further order may be taken with them as shall appear....

“6. Item that no swine be kept, within the said citie nor any other place, then ... side prively nor openlie after the xiii^th daie of this present moneth, upon paine of fyne and imprisonment of every person doing the contrary.

“7. Item that no donge, muck or filth, at any tyme, hearafter be caste within the walls of the said citie, upon paine of ffyne and imprisonment at his worships direction.

“8. Item that no kind or sort of ... or any wares from other place be brought in packs into the said citie of Chester, untill the same be ffirste opened and eired without the libities of the said citie, upon pain last recited.

“9. Item that papers or writing containing this sence Lord haue mercie upon us, to be fixed upon euery house, dore post, or other open place, to the street of the house so infected.

“10. Item that no person of the said citie doe suffer any their doggs to goe abrode out of their houses or dwellings, upon paine that euery such dogge so founde abrode shalbe presently killed. And the owners thereof ponished at his worships pleasure.”

It has always been found easier to make laws than to have them enforced, and we find certain inhabitants complaining of the disobedience of infected persons in the following petition:—

“To the right worshipful Sir John Savage, knight, maior of the Citie of Chester, the aldermen, sheriffs, and common counsaile of the same.

“In most humble wise complayninge sheweth unto your worships, your Orators, the persons whose name are subscribed inhabiting in a certain lane within the same citie called Pepper Street, That where yt haue pleased God to infect divers persons of the same Street with the plage, and where also for the avoidinge of further infection your worships have taken order that all such so infected should observe certaine good necessarye orders by your worships made and provided. But so it is, right worships, that none of the said persons infected do observe any of the orders by your worships in that case taken, to the greate danger and perill, not only of your Orators and their famelyes being in number twenty, but also of the reste of the said citie, who by the sufferance of God and of his gracious goodness are clere and safe from any infection of the said deceas: In consideration whereof your Orators moste humbly beseche your worships for God’s sake, and as your worships intend it your Orators should, by the sufferance of God, avoide the dangers of the said deceas with their family, and also for the better safty of the citie to take such directions with the said infected persons that they may clearly be avoided from thens to some other convenient for the time untill God shall restore them to their former health. And in this doing your Orators shall daily pray, &c.”[1]

During the visitation of the plague at Manchester in 1645, when the place suffered severely, the authorities not only provided “cabins” at Collyhurst for the reception of those whom the disease attacked, but engaged the services of “Doctor Smith,” who received £4 “for his charges to London and a free guift,” and £39 “for part of his wages for his service in the time of the visitation.” Thos. Minshull, the apothecary, was paid £6 2s. 6d. for “stuffe for ye town’s service.” Some “bottles and stuffe” were unused at the end of the plague, and these were sold to “Mr. Smith, Phissition,” for £1.

The story of English pestilence closes with the Great Plague of London in 1665. It began about the west end of the city, Hampstead, Highgate, and Acton sharing the infection, and gradually worked eastward by way of Holborn. Out of an estimated population of 460,000 there died 97,306 persons, of whom 68,596 perished of pestilence. One week witnessed 8,297 deaths, and it has been seriously argued that the official figures very much underrate the truth, and that in this week of highest mortality the deaths really amounted to 12,000. “Almost all other diseases turned to the plague.” Many of the clergy fled, and the places of some were occupied by the ejected Nonconformists. The complaint of absenteeism was also brought against the physicians, but there were certainly some who stayed in the infected and desolate city. “But Lord!” says Pepys, “what a sad time it is to all: no boats upon the river, and grass grown all up and down Whitehall Court, and nobody but poor wretches in the street.” William Boghurst, who was an apothecary, and Nathaniel Hodges, who was a physician, each wrote full accounts of the plague.

Hodges was the son of a vicar of Kensington, where he was born in 1629. He was a King’s scholar at Westminster, and was educated both at Cambridge and Oxford, taking his M.D. degree at the latter university in 1659. When the great plague broke out he remained at his house in Walbrook, and gave advice to all who sought it. There was unfortunately no lack of patients. Hodges’ writings give us a minute account of the “doctor in the time of pestilence.” The first doubtful appearances of the plague were noticed by Dr. Hodges amongst some of those who sought his counsel at the Christmas of 1664-5, in May and June there were some that could not be mistaken, and in August and September he was overwhelmed with work. He was an early riser, and after taking a dose of anti-pestilential electuary, he attended to any private business that needed immediate decision, and then went to his consulting room, and for three hours received a succession of patients, some already ill of the plague, others only infected by fear. Having disposed of these anxious inquirers, the doctor breakfasted, and then began his round of visits to patients who were unable to see him at home. Disinfectants were burnt on hot coals as he entered their houses, and he also took a lozenge. Returning home, he dined off roast meat and pickles, prefaced and followed by sack and other wine. A second round of visits did not terminate until eight or nine in the evening. He was an enemy of tobacco, but his dislike of the Indian weed did not extend to sack, which he seems to have drunk plentifully, especially perhaps on the two occasions when he thought he had himself caught the plague. These proved to be false alarms. Amongst the drugs he tried and found useless were “unicorn’s horn” and dried toads. The Corporation of London testified a due sense of Hodges’ services by a stipend and the position of physician to the city. His “Loimologia” is an important contribution to the literature of epidemics.

Hodges, who had thus been a witness of the Carnival of Death in the metropolis of England, may well have pondered on the words of one of his illustrious contemporaries, Sir Thomas Browne, who says:—“I have not those strait ligaments, or narrow obligations to the world as to dote on life, or be convulst and tremble at the name of Death. Not that I am insensible of the dread and horrour thereof; or by raking into the bowels of the deceased, continual sight of anatomies, skeletons, or cadaverous reliques, like vespilloes or grave makers, I am become stupid, or have forgot the apprehension of mortality: but that, marshalling all the horrors and contemplating the extremities thereof, I find not anything therein able to daunt the courage of a man, much less a well resolved Christian.... For a Pagan there may be some motive to be in love with life; but for a Christian to be amazed at Death, I see not how he can escape this dilemma, that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.”

Mountebanks and Medicine.

By Thomas Frost.

Mountebanks—a name derived from the Italian words monta in banco, mounting a bench—were, in company with their attendant zanies, or “Merry Andrews,” a popular class of public entertainers down to the earlier years of the present century. Their chief object, however, was not to provide a free entertainment, but to dispose of their nostrums to the crowds which the entertainment brought together. Andrew Borde, a medical practitioner at Winchester, who obtained a more than local reputation, enjoying the distinction of being one of the physicians of Henry VIII., is said to have been the original “Merry Andrew.” The story of his life is full of interest, and furnishes some curious information concerning the manners of his age and his class. Mr. George Roberts, who supplied Lord Macaulay with much material for his “History of England,” relates that Borde was a man of great learning, and had travelled on the continent. He made many astronomical calculations, which may not unfairly be supposed to have been for the purposes of astrology. He was a celibitarian and an ascetic, drinking water three times a week, wearing a hair-shirt next his skin, and keeping the sheet intended for his burial at the foot of his bed. As a mountebank, he frequented fairs, markets, and other places of public resort, and addressed those assembled in recommendation of his medicines. He was a fluent speaker, and the witticisms with which he interspersed his lectures never failed to attract, obtaining for him the name of “Merry Andrew.”